Blood on the Canvas

Chapter 2: Half the Truth

Aaron had been trying to mind his own business about it for two days, which was two days longer than he usually managed.

"You're being weird," he told his father Thursday night, dropping into the chair across from him at the kitchen table. "Weirder than usual weird. What was that phone call about?"

His father didn't look up from the invoice he was pretending to read. "Nothing you need to worry about."

"That's not an answer."

"It's the only one you're getting."

Aaron studied him for a moment — the tightness around his eyes, the way he kept glancing toward the window like he expected someone to be standing on the other side of it. Aaron had grown up watching this exact expression cross his father's face maybe twice before in his life: once, years ago, right before a man had come to the door about money his father owed a cousin who'd since disappeared from their lives entirely, and once, six years ago, in the terrible stretch of days after the accident that took their mother, when grief and fear had briefly worn the same face.

"This is about Elizabeth's shortcut Saturday, isn't it," Aaron said slowly. "The Cobalt Street thing."

His father's hand stilled on the invoice.

"Dad."

"There's talk," his father said finally, low, like the words cost him something to say out loud. "At the shop. About some of the gang business spreading east of where it usually stays. Nothing confirmed. Nothing I can prove. Just enough that I don't love the idea of your sister and Bianca cutting through there this weekend."

"Then tell her not to."

"You know how well that'll go over."

Aaron did know. Elizabeth had inherited exactly none of their father's caution and all of their mother's stubbornness, a combination that had gotten her grounded more times growing up than Aaron could count, and which meant that telling her to avoid a four-block shortcut on vague, unconfirmed rumors would almost certainly result in her taking that exact shortcut out of pure principle.

"I'll talk to her," Aaron said, though he wasn't sure what good it would do.

---

He found her in her room an hour later, headphones around her neck, sketchbook open on her lap — one of Bianca's faces mid-laugh, half-finished, the kind of quick, affectionate portrait Elizabeth drew constantly without ever quite finishing any of them.

"Dad's freaking out about Saturday," Aaron said, leaning in the doorway.

"I noticed." Elizabeth didn't look up from the sketch. "He made me and Bianca promise to text him the second we're walking home. Both of us. Separately. Like we'd forget otherwise."

"Maybe take him seriously this once."

That got her attention. She looked up, eyebrow raised in the exact way that meant she was about to argue purely because being told what to do made her contrary on principle. "It's four blocks, Aaron. We've walked it a thousand times."

"That's not what I said."

"It's what you meant."

"Liz." He crossed the room and sat on the edge of her bed, serious now in a way that made her expression soften slightly. "I'm not saying don't go out. I'm saying maybe skip the shortcut this once. Take the long way. Twenty extra minutes, and Dad stops looking like he's aged five years in two days."

Elizabeth was quiet for a moment, glancing back down at the half-finished sketch of Bianca's laughing face.

"Fine," she said eventually. "Long way home. Happy?"

"Ecstatic."

"You're such a mom sometimes, you know that?"

"Someone has to be," Aaron said, standing, ruffling her hair on his way out despite her indignant swat at his hand, "since apparently Dad's too busy being cryptic about it."

---

Two doors down, Bianca was having a version of the same argument with herself, alone in her room, staring at a text from Elizabeth that read: Dad and Aaron being paranoid about Saturday. Might take the long way home instead of Cobalt. Thoughts?

She thought about her own father downstairs, on his fourth beer by now if the sound of the fridge opening every twenty minutes was any indication, the specific quiet that had settled over the house since the layoffs at the shop — a quiet that felt like waiting for something to break. She thought about how much she wanted Saturday to just be normal, uncomplicated, an actual break from all of it.

Long way's fine, she typed back. Whatever gets everyone to stop being weird about it.

Deal. See you at 7?

See you at 7.

She set the phone down and looked at herself in the mirror above her dresser for a moment — tired around the eyes in a way she didn't like admitting to, carrying more than she'd said out loud to anyone, even Elizabeth. Two more days until Saturday. Two more days of her father's uncertain mood, of Elizabeth's father's unexplained fear, of a low, humming unease that neither of their families could quite name but every one of them seemed to feel regardless.

She told herself it was nothing. Overprotective parents, city gossip, nothing more.

Downstairs, she heard the fridge open again, the soft hiss of another can, and closed her eyes, and told herself that whatever storm was building in her own house would pass the same way it always did — by morning, quietly, unspoken, the way everything in her family eventually got absorbed into silence rather than resolved.

Her phone buzzed once more before she put it down for the night. Elizabeth again.

Aaron says hi btw. Also says you still owe him dance lessons. I told him you have zero rhythm.

Bianca smiled despite everything, typed back tell him I have plenty of rhythm, he just can't handle my energy, and set the phone face-down on her nightstand. Whatever was going on with both their fathers, whatever strange, unspoken tension had settled over both houses this week, at least there was still this — Elizabeth, steady and constant two doors down, making her laugh at the end of an otherwise heavy day the way she always had, the way Bianca assumed, without ever once questioning it, she always would.