Indigo (For The Love of Purple #1) - Audrey Faye Page 0,3

that’s shaking my inner compass, because Mabel might be annoying, but she isn’t wrong. I have been waiting. It took a while to understand that this wasn’t one of my usual tugs—the kind with an unhappy ghost who needs to be seen or heard at the other end of it.

I scrub my hands through my hair, trying to gather myself and feeling like I should have somehow known that today was going to be important. “What year is it?” There are at least a dozen canvases spread out around me. I’ve been busy. And oblivious.

In my life, they tend to go together.

A chuckle from behind me. Mabel, back to standing at the window as she so often does. “It’s nearly spring and the mists taste of sunshine. The days will be long, soon.”

That might or might not be true. Mabel isn’t much for calendars. She prefers poetry. I’d consult my phone, but I’m not sure where I put it, and I’m pretty sure my forty-fifth birthday hasn’t come and gone without me noticing. I’m quite capable of that level of oblivion if my painting is on a streak, but Mabel isn’t.

My brain digs up a random and possibly useful detail. I leased this apartment until the end of April. Given the piles of half-packed boxes on the periphery of the room and the lack of someone pounding on the door to evict me, that date probably hasn’t arrived yet. Which means the sad spirit I spent the winter consoling and the early spring painting hasn’t entirely befuddled my sense of time.

The paintings are fantastic. Roger will be happy.

I lean back in my chair and nearly land on my head, because apparently I picked a stool to sit on this morning.

Mabel manages not to laugh. Mostly.

I sigh, lever my butt off the stool, and cross over to the window. It’s definitely wet out there, the kind of light drizzle that shrouds the street below in mist and hides whoever is on the other end of the tugging. Which is easily solved, but the muttering inside me says it’s not quite time, yet.

I scowl. That’s just fine when I’m dealing with a ghost. They don’t have timelines that involve living and dying and eating breakfast somewhere in between.

My inner compass doesn’t relent. Not yet. Soon.

I lean my forehead against the cold glass. I can be a patient guy when I need to be, but if she’s really here, every button I have is about to get pushed, and that’s not a thing that comes with a whole lot of patience. Especially now that I can feel her more strongly.

So much energy. Layers of it. And truth.

I squint, trying to see through the mists and evade the thoughts forming in my head. Truth is a fungible thing in my world, one that is often better tucked into the layers of paintings than spoken directly. Somewhere in the darkness before my sixth birthday, I learned that most people don’t want to hear the truth.

Ghost touch, this time on the back of my hand. “Let her see you, Drew. Promise me that.”

I sigh. Mabel knows me far better than most mothers know their sons. “Maybe. I need to know more about her, first.” Trust comes slowly for me, at least with the living. But thanks to a ghost who decided to take on a lost boy and help him become a man, it does come. “I need you to give us some distance.”

A quiet snicker. “I’ve never watched you kiss your lasses, or bed them, either.”

Mabel rarely talks of her life, but my working theory is that she was a barmaid on the very rough side of some town. “I don’t mean just that. This is a walk I need to take on my own.” Words that I know will hurt her some, but there’s always been truth between us, even when it’s not pleasant.

A promise she extracted from a young boy—and made to him, too.

“I know.” Her words are tinged with pride. Her regret, I can only feel. “You’ve grown into a wonderful man, Andrew Bartholomew.”

I draw a heart in the condensation on the window. A copy of the one she once drew for a crying boy. “I had some help getting there.”

The regret eases, replaced by the common-sense love that has wrapped around me for almost forty years. “You needed some help back then. Maybe now, you don’t. Although you’re still a terrible wastrel with those brushes of yours.”

She’s not wrong about that.