By morning, the mural was there.
Isla stood on the front porch with a piece of buttered toast in one hand and a stubborn curl pinned between her lips as she twisted her braid. She hadn't planned to go outside—not this early, not when the fog was still thick and the wind had that knife's-edge chill—but the sight across the street had pulled her like gravity.
The bakery wall, once a crumbling stretch of moldy brick and bad graffiti, was now painted in sweeping strokes of cobalt, teal, and deep lavender. The image wasn't fully finished—sections were still raw and sketchy—but it was breathtaking.
A girl stood in the center of the wall, or rather floated, her hair fanning around her like seaweed in slow motion. She wore a dress made of stormclouds, and her eyes—large, luminous—were the exact shade of an oncoming tide. Her hands reached forward as if beckoning someone… or warning them away.
Isla swallowed hard. The toast went cold in her hand.
"She looks like you," said a voice behind her.
She nearly jumped out of her skin.
Viola, wrapped in a maroon shawl and carrying a mason jar of lemon balm tea, strolled up the porch like she hadn't just startled the hell out of her best friend. Her nails were painted lavender, and there were small wax smudges on her jeans from her candle shop. She always smelled like cloves and roses and quiet rebellion.
"What?" Isla blinked. "She does not."
Viola sipped her tea, eyes still on the mural. "The hair. The mouth. That weird melancholy you do with your face when you think no one's watching."
"I do not have a melancholy face."
"You do," Viola said, completely serious. "It's your brand."
Isla tried to protest, but something in her chest was twisting—low and strange. That girl on the wall... there was something unsettlingly familiar about her. The shape of her lips. The slope of her neck.
And there, beside the mural, a name was scrawled in that same looping brushstroke as the artwork:
L. Vale
The man from last night.
"I think he's squatting in the Vale house," Viola added, as if they were discussing something mundane like yogurt prices. "You know, the one up on Driftwood Hill. His sister used to be in my pottery class before she passed. They were close. He's older now. Hotter too, if you're into the brooding artist type."
"I'm not," Isla lied.
Viola smirked. "Sure."
They stood in silence a moment longer. The sea wind brushed against their skin, cool and smelling of salt and kelp. A gull wheeled overhead, screaming its complaints to the sky.
"Are you going to say hello?" Viola asked.
"To a man who paints strangers on condemned buildings?" Isla scoffed. "No, I am not."
"Right. Of course not," Viola said, turning back toward town. "You're just going to stand on your porch every morning, toast in hand, wearing his muse's expression until one of you combusts from unresolved sexual tension."
"I hate you."
"I know."
Viola disappeared down the road, humming something jazzy and inappropriate for 8 a.m.
---
Later that day, Isla couldn't stop thinking about the mural.
She tried to work. Tried to lose herself in the manuscript a client had sent—a moody vampire thriller with too many metaphors and not enough commas—but her thoughts kept drifting.
To the shape of the girl's hands.
To the way the sea in the mural mirrored the one beyond her window.
To L. Vale.
By late afternoon, the sky had turned brittle blue, cloudless and cool, the kind of day Dawnmere wore like a secret. She grabbed her jacket, the one with constellation patches on the elbows, and walked. Not toward the wall. Not at first.
But her feet had ideas of their own.
The bakery was empty, as expected. But a canvas tarp was spread across the sidewalk, weighed down by jars of paint in every imaginable hue. Brushes of different sizes—some frayed, some pristine—lay in a deliberate kind of chaos. And there, perched on a milk crate with his back to her, sat him.
He was eating an apple. Shirtless. Covered in paint.
She froze.
His back was a map of stories. Tattoos in foreign script wound across his shoulder blades, and lower down, near his spine, a tree spread its inked branches wide—delicate and dark.
He turned, just slightly.
Caught her.
His gaze was not startled. Not smug.
Just steady.
"Hi," he said, biting the apple again, juice glinting on his bottom lip. "You came."
Isla opened her mouth. Closed it. Swallowed.
"I was walking."
"That's what I do when I'm pretending not to stare at strangers, too," he said with a grin.
She glared, stepping forward. "Why did you paint that girl?"
His grin faded. Something unreadable passed over his face.
"She wanted to be seen," he said, almost too quietly. "And no one else was doing it."