Chapter 5
The car cut through the city toward Lane Manor. The night was thick and dark, and the streets stretched out empty ahead of him.
Richard leaned back against the seat and closed his eyes, but his mind kept circling back to Evelyn's voice. "Richard, I'm done being her stand-in."
He thought of how pale she had looked lately, how much weight she had lost, and how she would sometimes press a hand to her stomach with a quiet wince.
He had asked her about it once, and she brushed it off as an old stomach problem, nothing new.
The car rolled to a stop in front of Lane Manor. Richard pushed the door open and stepped inside. The living room was pitch black. He flicked on the lights, and the sudden brightness stung his eyes.
Everything looked the same as it always did, but something was wrong. The house was too quiet.
There was no warm smell of milk drifting from the kitchen, no slippers lined up neatly by the door, and no silhouette of her curled up on the couch with a book.
He climbed the stairs and pushed open the bedroom door.
The bed was made without a single crease. He opened the closet, and her side was completely empty. The vanity had been wiped clean, leaving nothing behind.
The bathroom was the same. Her toothbrush, her towels, her shampoo, every trace of her had been erased, as if she had never lived here at all.
Richard stood in the middle of the room, and a sudden chill ran through him. The thermostat was set to a comfortable temperature, but goosebumps still prickled across his skin.
He walked over to the closet and pulled open his side. His shirts hung in a neat row, arranged by color.
Tucked in the very back was a woman's nightgown. It was Evelyn's.
Richard lifted it from the hanger. It was light, almost weightless, and it carried a faint trace of laundry detergent, the same brand she always used. He held it in his hands, the fabric soft against his fingers.
He set the pajamas down and walked toward the studio.
The studio sat at the end of the hallway. It had been a guest room once, but Evelyn converted it three years ago. She spent at least an hour in here every day without fail.
He rarely came in, though on sleepless nights he would sometimes stand in the doorway and glance inside.
He pushed the door open, and the sharp smell of turpentine and paint hit him immediately. Richard flipped on the light and froze.
A white cloth draped over the easel, covering the portrait she had been working on for three years. His portrait. Evelyn added a little more each day, and after three years, it still wasn't finished. He remembered that.
But the portrait wasn't what stopped him. It was the wall.
An entire wall, covered in sketch paper.
Hundreds of drawings pressed edge to edge, from floor to ceiling, and every single one was him. Him eating. Him working. Him sleeping. Him frowning. His back, his profile, close-ups of his hands. All of it was him.
Richard stepped closer and studied them one by one.
The paper had yellowed with age. The earliest sketches dated back three years. The brushstrokes evolved from clumsy to confident, from rough outlines to fine detail, and each sheet had a date in the bottom-right corner, from September 23rd three years ago to today.
He moved from one drawing to the next. One captured the way he twirled his pen during meetings. He hadn't even known he did that.
Another showed the slight furrow of his brow when he drank his coffee. He'd never realized he frowned when he drank coffee.
Some of the sketches had small notes written beside them.
[He only ate half his meal today. Poor appetite.]
[3 a.m. He's still in his study. Seventh cough.]
[The stitching on his shirt cuff is coming undone. Need to fix it tomorrow.]
[It rained, and he forgot his umbrella. Stomachache. He looked pale.]
[Claire called. He smiled. First time I've seen him smile in three years.]
That last line hit him like a needle through the chest.
Richard stood before the wall, staring at hundreds upon hundreds of his own face. She had sat in this studio, day after day, and drawn him stroke by stroke onto blank paper.
Why?
Did a stand-in really need to go this far?
The contract only required her to play the role of his wife. It never asked her to memorize every small habit he had.
It never asked her to count how many times he coughed. It never asked her to notice when a button on his shirt came loose.
So why did she do all of this?
Richard walked over to the easel and pulled the white cloth aside.
The portrait was nearly finished. The man on the canvas stared back at him with a complicated expression, caught somewhere between struggle and confusion, threaded with exhaustion. Evelyn had captured emotions he hadn't even recognized in himself.
In the corner of the canvas, a line of pencil script was barely visible against the white: [I'll never get your eyes right, because I'll never understand you. But maybe I don't want to.]
"Don't want to?" Richard stared at those words for a long time.
He needed to find her. Now.
He needed to ask her why.