This time, he returns to grunting as an appropriate form of communication.
"So what? We're supposed to just stop making beautiful things because the world's broken?" My fingers brush the edge of the closed sketchbook still clutched in his hand. "That seems like letting the ruin win."
His piercing blue eyes lock onto mine, suddenly defensive. "Survival isn't winning, Sunshine. It's just not dying yet."
He turns abruptly, placing the sketchbook back on the workbench with surprising care, his back a solid wall of worn flannel.
The wind howls against the windowpane and I shiver, but this time, I don't think it's from the cold.
"Why do you hide them?” I whisper, gesturing to the stack of hidden books.
He shrugs, looking away again. “No one needs to see them. They’re for me.”
“Art isn’t meant to be hidden, Edward,” I say gently. “It’s meant to be shared. To connect. To heal.”
I lean around him and grab the sketchbook back from the top of the pile, making sure to lock eyes with him as I do it. I hold it carefully, right over my heart. “This is powerful.Youare powerful.”
The storm outside howls, a fierce punctuation mark to our fragile moment of connection.
Edward doesn’t respond, but he also doesn’t take the sketchbook from me. He simply stares into the fire, his shoulders a little less rigid, his gaze a little less haunted.
“Well,” I say, a small, genuine smile gracing my lips. “Looks like I found my inspiration after all. You, Edward Rogers. And your incredibly artistic, grumpy… soul.”
He grunts, but this time, there's a ghost of something almost like a smile pulling at the corner of his mouth. Almost.
I settle back onto the fold-out bed, placing the sketchbook carefully beside me. The storm rages on, isolating us further, but inside, a new kind of space seems to have opened up. A crack in the fortress.
I pull out my own small sketchbook, the one I’d managed to keep dry, and a pencil. I look at Edward, still staring into the fire, still a mountain of a man brooding alone inside his head.
Only now, with a tiny, almost imperceptible sliver of light shining from within.
My pencil begins to move, translating the angles of his face, the intensity of his gaze, the quiet power of his solitude onto the page.
He doesn’t notice. Or if he does, he doesn’t comment.
The silence that settles between us this time is different.
It’s not awkward, not uncomfortable. It’s the quiet of two people sharing a space, sharing an unexpected connection, sharing the vast, echoing silence of the storm-beaten mountain.
And as the last rays of twilight fade completely, painting the cabin in shades of gray and firelight, I realize something.
Edward Rogers, with his gruff exterior and his hidden depths, is far more than just a man. He’s a landscape waiting to be explored, a story waiting to be told.
And I, Penny Kaye, am just the artist to do it.
Chapter 4
Edward
The dull throb behind my eyes is a familiar companion these days. A constant reminder of the torment of one too many sleepless nights.
But today, it’s competing with another, more unfamiliar ache: the echo of Penny’s voice.
Beautiful and heartbreaking. But it’s beautiful.Her compliments about my drawings had burrowed deep, bypassing the usual defenses, stirring something I thought long dead.
My sketches, my darkest, most private confessions, laid bare by a woman who saw not brokenness, but beauty.
It was unnerving. Disorienting.
