Every Past Thing. Pamela Thompson

had wanted it. Mary and Samuel both. Though it is no recompense to be near his brother again. Edwin halfheartedly scribbles in the jagged edges around the man’s headband. The cloth has been cut with pinking shears. Must be from a costume shop.

      Samuel would be perfectly comfortable with Ward. They would sit together in some paneled clubroom, drinks in hand. Samuel would lean back, stretch his feet out, listen without judgment—he would let Ward be a fool, or not. Under his steady gaze, the shape of Ward’s character would emerge.

      That’s not the only place he’s seen her with her clothes off, I’ll warrant, Edwin had heard another student say of Ward and one of the models.

      It had startled him.

      “Why do you think he keeps having her back? The light’s better in the studio.”

      The students laughed, but Edwin did not join them.

      He wants to see Ward alone on the world’s most beautiful hill with his paper and chalk. See what he is made of there, under the unforgiving sky.