Eventually, she felt Lex shift to look over at her sketch. But she didn't pull it away this time. She let him look.
"Is that your mother," he asked quietly.
Aria nodded. A lump had formed in her throat.
"She's beautiful," he said.
"Yeah," Aria said, swallowing over the lump in her throat. "She is."
He studied the picture for a few more moments.
"Aria...I-I have to tell you something-" he began, but she cut him off.
"What did your mother look like," she asked, turning to a blank page. Not wanting to look at her mother's face for another second. She didn't want to talk about her mother. It was making the dark thoughts from the night before resurface.
"What?"
"Your mother? What did she look like," she repeated. "I-I could draw her for you."
He looked a little taken aback. "Aria, you don't have to do that."
"I want to."
He hesitated. Just when she thought he'd tell her he didn't want to talk about his mother, either, he spoke up. "She looked like Grace," he said.
And so, he began describing her. Aria drew after asking him for specific details, like her nose's exact shape or if she'd had a full top lip.
After she got a good idea of how the woman had looked, she drew her part by part, an eye here, the angle of her jaw there. She drew the woman. She couldn't tell how realistic the drawing was, but if Lex's face was anything to go by, she'd gotten close.
"Thank you," he said, after studying it for what felt like a full five minutes.
She went to rip the page out to give it to him, but he stopped her.
"No," he said. "Keep it in there. With the one of your mother."
"But I drew it for you."
"I know. And it's-it's perfect. But you should keep it in there."
She wasn't sure why he was so adamant about her keeping the picture. But maybe it had made him too sad? She thought about how she felt, looking at Katy's picture. A part of her understood.
"Let's play a game," she said, desperate to change the subject. She wanted to feel light again, not weighed down by the image of dead mothers.
"What," he asked, smiling a little. "A game?"
"Yeah, don't you have those down here? Or do you just kill people for fun," she asked. For a second, she thought he'd get offended.
"Very funny. But I meant like, what kind of game, you little brat."
"Rat," she laughed. It was such a ridiculous thing to call someone. "Who the hell calls someone a rat? Wait, who the hell calls their wife a rat?"
"I do," he said, "because unlike the others...my wife is a little rat."
Aria turned on her back, really laughing now.
He poked her stomach. "Are you done? Didn't you say something about a game?"
"Okay, so there's this game I used to play with my best friend. Our dads would join us, but we were really good, so we almost always won. You can't talk, but you have to do something to...like, you have to describe a word or a place or anything really, but...you can't talk. Does that make sense," she asked.
The look on his face told her that no, it didn't make sense.
She sighed. She got up to show him an example.
"Okay, so if my word is 'food,' I'd do something like this" she took a bite from an invisible apple and made a show of pretending to chew it and swallow "to describe it. I'd keep going until you guessed right or gave up. Got it?"
He nodded.
They played for hours, using basically anything they could think of. They both got frustrated easily when the other person took too long to give up or get the word right. Half of the time, they ended up laughing about some of the ridiculous things they did. Aria had never heard Lex laugh so much. The smile on his face made it hard for her not to smile, too.
Chapter 21
He got off the bed and went to put more wood in the fireplace.
"You should put more in there," Aria said after he stuck a thick log into the fire.
"Why? Are you cold," he asked.
"No, but we'll be heading to bed soon. It'll probably get a little chilly," she said, a smile playing at her lips. "You might get cold again...."
"Shut up," he said, rolling his eyes.
Aria laid down, now really smiling at him. "What? I'm only being considerate?"
"No, you're not. You're trying to make another...cuddling joke, or whatever," Lex said, laying down on his side.
"No, I wasn't," she said, trying to look innocent.
"Right."
Aria studied his face for a few moments. He'd been the total opposite of everything she'd expected when she came here. And it seemed like the more time she spent with him, the better she got to know him, the more she liked the person she was learning he was.
"Lex, I have to tell you something," she said quietly. She was pretty sure that she had run out of time, that she had to tell him. It scared her. Telling him would probably ruin the small connection that was growing between them. But she had no choice.
"What is it?"
"I-I know who took the knife," she said, looking down.
He stayed quiet, but she noticed him clenching his fists.
"It was Ben," she said, "But-but he knows that it was a mistake. And he only did it because he was afraid of what might happen. You have to understand. It was stupid, he knows that now. But-" her voice died in her throat. She didn't know what else to add.
She looked up at him, trying to read his face to get a little idea of how he'd react to the news.
"And how long have you known that," he asked, his voice even, his face not giving anything away.
"I suspected for a while..." she said. She knew she was being vague and that
