The Shed

She found out about Marcus three weeks later, entirely by accident, on a Saturday afternoon.

She was cutting through the allotments on the way home from her grandmother's house, which was a route she took because it was fifteen minutes shorter and because she liked the smell of growing things and the particular quietness of the allotment paths in autumn.

One of the sheds had its door ajar. She would not have noticed except that music was coming out of it, very faint, something slow and classical that she recognised from one of her grandmother's records.

She stopped. She knew whose allotment this was because she had walked past it every Saturday for two years and the same man was usually here, older, with a green cap. He was not here today. The shed door was open and the music was playing and through the gap she could see a figure sitting on an upturned crate.

It was Marcus. He had a sketchbook open on his knees and he was drawing with total concentration, the kind of concentration where the whole rest of the world goes away and there is only the thing in front of you. He had not heard her stop. His pencil moved in small careful strokes across the page and he was completely, entirely absorbed.

Lena stood on the path for a moment.

She knew she should walk on. It felt wrong to watch someone who did not know they were being watched, especially someone in the middle of something private and concentrated like that. But she stood there for three seconds, maybe four, before she made herself move.

She must have made a sound because he looked up.

The moment his eyes met hers was one of the more uncomfortable moments Lena had experienced in recent memory. He had the expression of someone who had been completely private and had suddenly, unexpectedly, not been.

She recognised that expression. She had worn it herself, in her imagination, every time she pictured someone finding the notebook.

"Sorry," she said immediately. "I was cutting through. I was not trying to look."

Marcus closed the sketchbook. Not fast, not panicked, but deliberately, the way you close something you are not ready to share.

"It is fine," he said. His voice was careful.

"I did not see anything," Lena said, which was not entirely true but felt like the right thing to say.

He looked at her for a moment. Then he looked at the sketchbook on his knees.

"I draw," he said. Very simply. Like a confession he had not planned to make.

"I know," Lena said. Then: "I mean, I do not know. I can see that you draw. I have not seen what you draw."

"It is just something I do," he said. "I do not talk about it."

"Okay," Lena said.

He looked up at her. "You are not going to ask why?"

"No," she said. "I understand not wanting to talk about something."

Something shifted in his face. A small thing, barely visible, but she saw it.

"Right," he said. "Okay."

She walked on. Her heart was doing something she chose not to examine too closely until she was safely around the corner and then she examined it very thoroughly all the way home and arrived at her front door without any useful conclusions.