Painted Hearts

Chapter 5: Tyler's World

The apartment looked smaller every time she came back.

Emily noticed it the way you notice something that has always been true but keeps becoming more true — the ceiling a little lower, the hallway a little narrower, the kitchen a little more crowded with the specific clutter of two people trying to live carefully in not enough space. Tyler's basketball shoes by the door. Her father's old toolbox under the radiator that she'd never moved because moving it felt too final. The gallery's overflow inventory stacked in the corner of the living room — rolled canvases, bubble-wrapped frames, the beautiful problem of too much art and not enough wall.

She'd been at the penthouse for four days. Coming back here felt like exhaling.

"You look tired," Tyler said, by way of greeting. He was at the kitchen counter making a sandwich with the focused commitment of someone who took sandwiches seriously. Seventeen years old, nearly six feet now, her father's jaw and her mother's eyes and an expression of permanent shrewd assessment that was entirely his own.

"Good morning to you too," Emily said, dropping her bag on the couch.

"It's one in the afternoon."

"Good afternoon."

He slid half the sandwich across the counter without being asked. She ate it standing up, which was how they'd always eaten in this kitchen — there was a table, technically, but it had long since become a surface for mail and sketchbooks and Tyler's homework.

"So," he said.

"So," she said.

"The penthouse."

"It's fine."

He gave her the look. The one that meant I am seventeen and I know when you're being incomplete with me.

"It's genuinely fine," she amended. "The studio is incredible. North-facing. This worktable that I—" She stopped herself before she could sound enthusiastic. "It's adequate. The work is straightforward."

"And him?"

Emily considered the question with more care than it should have required. "Professional," she said. "Keeps to himself mostly. We've barely spoken since the first evening."

This was true. Andre Thompson moved through his own apartment like a man who had perfected the art of occupying space without disturbing it. She saw him in the mornings sometimes — coffee in hand, already on his phone, already somewhere else mentally. He nodded when they passed in the hallway. He didn't linger.

She told herself this was ideal. She was starting to believe it.

"Marcus is nice," she added. "You'd like Marcus."

"I don't need to like anyone," Tyler said. "I need you to be safe."

"I'm safe."

"Em." He put his sandwich down and looked at her with directness she'd always found both exhausting and deeply comforting. "I looked him up."

She waited.

"Andre Thompson. Thirty-four. Net worth approximately four point two billion. Thompson Enterprises — real estate, hospitality, and some tech investment. His mother died when he was nine." A pause. "His father is Richard Thompson."

"I know who his father is."

"Richard Thompson tried to block a community arts grant in Bushwick three years ago. Said it was a misuse of municipal funding." Tyler's jaw tightened. "He was talking about Mrs. Patterson's program. Where I took my first photography class."

Emily was quiet for a moment. "Andre isn't his father."

"How do you know?"

She thought about the Agnes Martin canvases in the corridor. The Giacometti sketch. The north-facing studio was assembled by someone who understood what painters needed. The simple white flowers on her dresser that had been replaced, without comment, when they wilted on day three.

"I don't," she said honestly. "Not yet."

Tyler studied her with those mother's eyes for a long moment. Then he picked up his sandwich again, which meant he'd decided to trust her judgment for now while reserving the right to revisit.

She loved him so much it was almost a physical sensation.

"Your teacher called," she said, steering them toward safer ground. "Mr. Alex. He says you haven't submitted the history paper."

"It's mostly done."

"Tyler."

"It's mostly done."

"That's not a quantity."

"I'll submit it tonight." He waved a hand. "I've been busy."

"Doing what?"

A fractional hesitation — barely anything, the kind of pause that wouldn't have registered to anyone who hadn't spent seventeen years reading this particular face.

"School stuff," he said.

Emily set down her sandwich half. "Tyler."

"Em, it's nothing."

"You hesitated."

"I'm chewing."

"You'd already swallowed." She kept her voice level, the way their mother had kept her voice level when she knew something was being kept from her — not accusatory, just steady, a door held open. I'm here. You can walk through. "What's going on?"

Tyler was quiet for a moment. The refrigerator hummed. Somewhere below, a car horn sounded, muffled and distant.

"Some guys came by again," he said finally. "Tuesday night. Knocked on the door."

Emily's stomach dropped. "Meridian?"

"They didn't say. But it was the same guy from before. The one with the—" He gestured vaguely at his neck.

The tattoo. She knew the one.

"What did they say?" Her voice was still level. She was proud of that.

"That the payment schedule was being reviewed." Tyler's jaw was tight. "I told them you were handling it. They said—" He stopped.

"What did they say, Ty?"

He looked at her. "They said they knew where I went to school."

The kitchen was very quiet.

Emily picked up her sandwich and put it back down. She pressed her hands flat on the counter and breathed — once, twice — the way her mother had taught her, in through the nose, out slow.

They know where he goes to school.

"Okay," she said.

"Em—"

"It's okay." She straightened up. The levelness in her voice was real now, not performed — she'd moved through the fear and come out the other side into something colder and more useful. "I'm handling it. The arrangement with Thompson — it clears the Meridian debt. Completely. Within the month."

"Are you sure?"

"Marcus confirmed it in writing." She held his gaze. "They cannot touch us after that. Legally, contractually, nothing."

Tyler was quiet for a long moment. Then some of the tightness left his shoulders — not all of it, but enough.

"Okay," he said softly.

"Submit the history paper."

He almost smiled. "Tonight."

"Tonight, Tyler. Not tonight-adjacent. Not the conceptual vicinity of tonight."

"I said tonight."

"I need you to be okay," she said, and her voice came out quieter than she intended, stripped of the practical briskness she'd been maintaining. "That's the whole point of all of this. You are okay. You understand that?"

Tyler looked at her for a moment with an expression she recognized — it was the look he'd worn at their parents' funeral, standing beside her in clothes that were slightly too small because they'd bought them the year before and hadn't anticipated needing them, holding her hand with both of his.

"Yeah," he said quietly. "I know."

She pulled him into a hug, which he allowed with the particular grace of a teenage boy who would never admit he needed it but clearly did. He was taller than her now — that still surprised her sometimes, the way he'd grown while she wasn't looking, while she was busy managing debts and gallery schedules and the logistics of grief.

"I'm coming back next Wednesday," she said into his shoulder. "Keep your phone on."

"My phone is always on."

"It is never on."

"It's on silent. That's functionally on."

She pulled back and looked at him. "Paper. Tonight."

"Tonight," he agreed.

She took the subway back.

She could have taken a cab — Marcus had given her a card for expenses — but she needed the forty minutes of underground transit, the specific democratic chaos of the New York subway, strangers pressed close, and the screech of metal on metal and the stations rolling past like punctuation. She needed to be in her city, her actual city, before she went back up to the forty-third floor.

She stood holding the pole and stared at the darkness through the window and thought about the man with the tattoo on his neck saying, " We know where he goes to school.

One month. Twenty-six days left.

She thought about Tyler's face when the tightness left his shoulders. The specific relief of someone who had been carrying something heavy and had, for a moment, been allowed to put it down.

She could do twenty-six days.

She could do anything for twenty-six days.

Her phone buzzed.

An unknown number. She answered out of a habit formed by too many months of waiting for gallery inquiries.

"Ms. Wilson." A voice she didn't recognize — smooth, male, carefully pleasant. "My name is Julian Thompson. I believe we have a mutual acquaintance."

Emily gripped the pole a little tighter.

"Andre's brother?" she said carefully.

A warm laugh. "Stepbrother. The less impressive one, according to most." A pause that managed to feel rehearsed. "I hope I'm not intruding. I just wanted to reach out — I heard about your arrangement with Andre, and I thought it might be nice for you to have someone to talk to. Someone who understands what it's like to be in his orbit."

The train screeched around a bend.

"How did you get this number?" Emily asked.

A brief pause — barely a heartbeat, but she caught it.

"Andre's assistant," he said smoothly. "Marcus mentioned you might appreciate a friendly face."

Emily said nothing.

She filed the lie away quietly — Marcus, who had been nothing but careful and kind, would not have given her number to anyone without asking her first. She knew that with a certainty she couldn't entirely explain, only feel.

"That's kind of you," she said, in the pleasant neutral tone she used with difficult gallery clients. "I'm quite settled, but I appreciate you reaching out."

"Of course." Another warm smile she could hear without seeing. "Well, the offer stands. Andre can be — intense. It's nice to have someone in your corner."

"I'll keep that in mind."

She hung up.

The train pulled into her stop — not her stop, Andre's stop, forty-three floors above the street — and she stood on the platform for a moment as the other passengers moved around her.

Julian Thompson.

She thought about the hesitation before Marcus mentioned you. The smoothness was slightly too smooth. The friendliness that arrived from nowhere, with perfect timing, aimed precisely at the seam between her and Andre where doubt might fit.

She was an artist. She looked at things.

She looked at this, and she didn't like what she saw.

She climbed the stairs back into the light and walked toward the building, and told herself it was probably nothing, and knew she didn't believe that, and decided to be watchful anyway.

Keep your eyes open, her mother said.

"They're open," Emily said quietly, to the afternoon street.

She pushed through the lobby doors and went back up to the forty-third floor.