The Key to Anchor Lake ✓

51 : Blaire

B L A I R E

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Five hours until my date with Sukie. Five hours until sunrise over the lake. A bit less than five hours in which to sleep before I need to set off, and I'm not remotely tired. Wide awake and wired, more like, even though I know I'll be exhausted by the time the sun rises if I don't go to bed soon, but I can't sleep.

I've never been on a date before. I know this is different because I already know Sukie, I already love her, she's already my girlfriend. But it's still a date. My first date. Our first date. My first ever first date.

There's a chance I'm psyching myself out over this. I've been in bed since ten p.m. and now it's midnight and nothing has changed, except the time. I'm still buzzing with energy like a kid on Christmas Eve, and I can't find a way to distract myself long enough to slip out of consciousness – there's nothing on Netflix that can grab my attention, nothing even to put on as a comforting background.

At ten past midnight, I give up. I slip out of bed and pull on a dressing gown, and when I pad past Elizabeth's room to see her door ajar, bed empty, I know where to find her.

The attic stairs are creepy at night. This whole house is creepy at night, the whole town, and I hold my breath as I climb up to the studio. But there's nothing scary up there. There's a dim light hanging from an exposed beam in the angled ceiling, casting shadows over the paintings as Elizabeth works on the one in the light.

It isn't the stormy landscape anymore, I notice. That one is done already, leaning against the wall as it dries, cast aside in its perfection as though it was a mere afterthought. Now she's working on a view I recognise. A view I know.

It's almost the same as the one before, a view of the mountains across the vast expanse of lake, a copse of trees reaching out of a craggy island in the middle. But this time the sky is blue. The water is shimmering, reflecting green leaves and a bright halo of sun that skitters across the surface. The jetty juts out into the lake, those old wooden boards half painted and left for the time being while she works on the light bouncing across the water.

It's the view I told her to paint. The lake I wanted to preserve, that perfect stillness the day we scattered Mum's ashes. She has captured it in the most amazing detail and the painting isn't even finished yet, but I can already tell that the leaves are at peace, no breeze to ruffle them on their branches.

"I hope that's you, Blaire, and not an intruder," she says, standing close to the canvas as she perfects a mark that I can hardly see, one of thousands of perfect marks that make up an incredible piece.

"It's me."

"Don't you have to be up in the morning?"

I check my phone. "I need to be out of the house in exactly four and a half hours."

She glances over her shoulder at me. "Can't sleep?"

"Can't sleep."

"Come, sit over here." She tips her head at the deep armchair pushed against the wall. "Talk to me."

"What about?"

"Anything that'll make you tired," she says, turning on her stool to face me, one foot behind the rung as she mixes a new shade of blue-grey.

"Well, the idea of getting up at half four for a five a.m. date makes me tired," I say, "but it's also exciting, so I'm stuck."

Elizabeth adds the tiniest splash of white to her paint, swirling it in with the steel colour she's made. "Love is a powerful thing," she muses. "It makes and breaks."