“About making beautiful things.” She was challenging him. But she was also desperate to know. She leaned a little bit closer and tilted her long neck to look up at him.
“Okay, well …” Remi took a minute to get his foot-ing before the words just started shooting out of him. “I love the idea that I’m making something permanent. I like seeing something I’ve designed or built and knowing that my hands made it.” Julianne lifted her eyes just enough to see the earnest concentration on his face. “I like leaving a part of myself behind for people I may never even meet. Plus, I like using tools.” He shrugged.
“I guess that’s it. I don’t know.”
Remi stared expectantly at Julianne, who raised her eyes until they met his. They sat on the tile floor, staring at each other, for probably two whole minutes in shocked, self-conscious silence.
Then Remi stood up quickly and walked out, leaving Julianne alone in the room with her upside-down tiles and a whole lot of messy thoughts.
✦ ✦ ✦
She floated through the rest of the day, replaying her interaction with Remi over and over in her head. Even if for just a split second, she’d felt a flash of whatever she had felt on the beach the night they first met—that kind of ease or understanding that had made her feel like she could talk to him forever. Julianne racked her brain while she set one tile down beside the next, over and over again. She swirled one finger around in the cement,
watched the white goo harden on her skin. Remi had talked about architecture the same way she thought about art. But how could someone who felt something so pure about creating something new and exciting be so complacent about her naturally incredible beach—and the lives that people had built there? “Deep down, Remi gets it. I may have been right about him after all,” Julianne told herself, fixating on the flecks of light that had fil-tered in from the unsealed window frames in the bathroom.
✦ ✦ ✦
On her bike ride home, Julianne didn’t put on her iPod or even notice the familiar Palisades faces that waved hello as she rode by. She was still too preoccupied with Remi and their cryptic conversation. Why should it even matter to her what his intentions were? No matter how good his ideas about art were, no matter how insightful he was, he was still the enemy. But he seemed to understand something that she’d never been able to articulate to anyone else. Jules tapped her fingers on the handle-bars as she glided along, trying to puzzle it out. She wished her mom were here to help her make sense of the confusion. Her mother had always been so good at taking something and breaking it down into parts, turning it into something totally usable. Julianne had always
assumed that was why she was such a good painter. She could isolate light, isolate space, isolate movement, polish them all, and then snap them back into place where they belonged. Jules had always been messier. She didn’t re-create the things she saw around her; she broke them up and twisted them into new angles. Was that what she was doing with Remi—trying to make him into something else entirely because she wanted him to be something good? Her brain spinning and her stomach twisting, Julianne rode up to the house. She sat for a long moment staring up at her front door and wondered if it would be possible for her to ever find the middle ground, instead of the horizon.
Chapter Twelve
Julianne climbed the stairs and walked directly past her bedroom, right into Chloe’s. Flopping down on her sister’s red flowered Marimekko comforter, she announced, “I give up!”
Chloe, who had been sitting at her desk filling out her daily log for her internship at the Children’s Hospital, immediately snapped to attention. She popped out of her rolling chair and dove onto the bed, practically landing on top of Julianne.
“Tell me everything! What did he do? Oh, Jules, I knew he was bad news! So, what’s the deal? Are they selling the property and moving to Iceland? They’re not going to move out and sell it to some business, are they? That house is just ugly enough to have potential as a casino.”
“No, it’s not like that,” Julianne hedged. “I had a lot of time to think about it at work today, and I feel like some pieces are starting to come together.”
“What, what, what?” Chloe wheedled. “Is all of their building money embezzled? Can we call the IRS and shut them down? It’s major, isn’t it? I can just feel that it’s major! Don’t leave a sister hanging here!”
“I think we might be operating under slightly different definitions of ‘major,’ Chloe,” Julianne prefaced, before switching gears altogether. “Oh, I don’t even know. I had this really weird conversation with Remi at work today and now …” She paused, burying her head in a pillow. “I’m so confused!”
“What a jerk! Jules, you can’t let him get to you.”
Chloe poked Julianne in the side playfully, but Julianne didn’t even giggle. “C’mon, Debbie Downer—cheer up!”
Chloe grabbed a throw pillow from the head of her bed and pressed it against her chest, like she was trying to squeeze answers out of the satin-covered down. “I’m sure there’s a reasonable explanation for Remi giving you a hard time. Maybe he’s an alien. No, wait; I’ve got it—they’re plowing down the beach to make a puppy farm where they’re actually going to kick all of the puppies. That’s got to be it. It’s evil—pure evil. And now P.E.T.A. is closing in on them!” Julianne knew that Chloe was mostly kidding, but she couldn’t handle the Moore-bashing any longer. It was exhausting. Chloe studied her sister’s face. “What’s wrong? Jules, are you okay? You don’t look—”
“I’m just not sure
