Sempre: Redemption (Forever Series #2)(69)

For at every event, some lucky undergraduate students were given the opportunity of a lifetime: the chance to show their work. Students were given a topic and had to submit a single piece of art to be judged by the administration. The competition was stiff—out of the three thousand submissions, only the top twenty were chosen. The odds of being picked were less than one percent, but it didn’t stop the students from giving it everything they had.

November faded fast, weeks passing, and with it came the deadline for submission to the judging panel. The theme for the winter gala was “coldness” and Haven stayed busy, creating scene after scene of dramatic landscapes—ice, blizzards, and freezing rain—before finally settling upon a painting of a field with falling snow. Simple, but beautiful, the white mingling with the fading green. She spent Thanksgiving holed up in her small apartment, surrounded by warmth from the oversize metal radiator, perfecting her painting, as she ate dinner straight out of the carton from the local Chinese delivery place. She hardly noticed it was a holiday, too engrossed in her work, too determined not to dwell on those things.

* * *

When the school reopened the Monday after Thanksgiving, Haven turned her project in to her Painting I professor, Miss Michaels. She studied it for a moment before nodding. “I’ll be sure to submit it this afternoon.”

“Thank you,” Haven said, smiling proudly as she took one last look at her painting. She could see no flaws, everything precise, numerous art techniques she had learned portrayed. She couldn’t imagine what more they would want.

“You’re welcome, dear.”

Haven hurried home after class that morning, bundled up in a thick tan coat, to find Kelsey rushing out of the brownstone. Haven’s brow furrowed. She purposely had no morning classes so she wouldn’t have to be up at that hour.

“I’m heading to the studios,” Kelsey said, answering Haven’s question before she could ask it. “I totally forgot submissions were due. I haven’t even started mine!”

Haven stared at her with shock, blinking a few times. “Uh, good luck.”

Kelsey gave a halfhearted wave before taking off, running down the street.

* * *

Two weeks later, as class was dismissing, Miss Michaels handed out envelopes to each of the students. The room filled with the rumbling of murmurs and the sound of crumpling paper as her classmates discarded their letters in the trashcan on their way out the door.

Rejections, from what Haven could tell. It made her nerves flare.

Haven opened her envelope carefully, smoothing out the crease in the paper as she read the letter the whole way through.

We appreciate your effort . . .

The competition was stiff . . .

So much talent . . .

We regret to inform you . . .

Better luck next time . . .

Haven slowly absorbed the typed words, disappointment setting in when her eyes scanned the last sentence.

Your submission ranked number 348.

Nowhere near the top twenty.

“You okay, dear?”

Haven glanced at her professor as she refolded the letter, sliding it carefully back into the envelope. “I don’t understand what was wrong with my painting.”

“Nothing, technically speaking,” Miss Michaels said. “It just wasn’t what they were looking for.”

“Why?”

“You see, you took the assignment literally, and while there’s nothing wrong with that, it made it lack the one thing they truly wanted.”

“What’s that?”

“Soul,” she replied. “You could look at your painting and think coldness, but you couldn’t feel it. And that’s what’s important. Your paintings should make people feel something, even if they have no idea why.”

24

Time is a peculiar thing. A moment can feel like an eternity, while sometimes months can pass and seem like no time at all. It’s unreliable, and fickle, but it’s the most constant thing there is. Time. No matter what you do, you can’t stop it. The clock will continue to tick away, minutes passing into hours, hours into days, until suddenly you are standing there and it’s already a year later.

Christmas had arrived, twelve months passing since the day Carmine walked out the door in Durante. It had been a year marked with violence, with uncertainty, where doubt constantly lingered over his head like a stubborn storm cloud.

And the time showed on his face—his expression harder, his skin thicker, and his eyes bleaker, unfriendly and guarded. But in Carmine’s mind, he had difficulty reconciling that he had been away from his former life for so long. To him, it seemed like just yesterday he had seen Haven, just a moment ago he had heard her voice or listened to her laugh, that he had kissed her lips or made love to her. The time that passed had been a mere hazy blip for him, the blink of an eye, a single steady heartbeat, but the weariness in his bones carried the truth.

He had managed to survive a year without her . . . the first, he thought, of a lifetime to come.

Although he was a man now, seeing things a person ought not see, doing things men should never do, deep inside of him the boy still loitered. He dodged his family, sidestepping accountability in lieu of living in a delusional world of his own—a world where he somehow convinced himself he could beat time, that he wasn’t living his life dictated by the steady ticking of a clock, this one moving backward and not forward, counting down how many hours he had left on earth.