The Restoration Artist by Lewis DeSoto

fireplace where a couple of logs glowed.
    “Sit down,” she said.
    I sank onto the couch, overcome with fatigue, as if I had just run a great distance. From one of the drawers next to the sink she brought out a metal first aid box with a red cross on the lid. “Roll up your sleeve and let’s have a look.”
    There were a couple of small beads of blood along the gash on my forearm. I flexed my hand. “It doesn’t look too bad,” I told her.
    “We should put some disinfectant on it anyway.”
    It occurred to me that this was the second time she’d seen me injured. What must she think? “I’m not always like this,” I said. “In a mess of some kind.”
    She gave me the smallest of smiles.
    Holding my arm by the wrist she wiped the abrasion, then tipped a little alcohol onto the cloth from a small brown bottle and dabbed it on my forearm. I remembered being in a similar sort of occasion, with Père Caron that first day after my climb up the cliff. The same day I had first seen her too. I remembered the bruise on her cheek, which had faded now to a very faint discolouration.
    “You are shivering,” she said.
    When I held my hand out above the surface of the table, palm down, it was trembling. I clenched my fist. “That whole thing with the dog and the boy really shook me up.”
    She crossed to the counter under the window where a couple of wine bottles stood and poured some out into a glass. “Drink this,” she said, bringing the glass over.
    I swallowed, washing away the lingering metallic taste in my mouth.
    “Who is this boy?” she asked.
    “I thought you might know.”
    “Me?” She gave me a surprised look. “You keep mentioning him. Is he the same one you were searching for that day on the cliff?”
    “He reminds me of … someone.” I ran my hand across the paintbox, which I had placed on the couch next to me. My fingers traced the letters etched into the lid. “This was his. Piero.”
    “Where is he?”
    “I had a wife and a son. Claudine and Piero.”
    She stared at me. “Where are they now?”
    “They’re gone.”
    “Have they left you?” It was almost a whisper.
    I put my hands over my face and shook my head.
    Touching me lightly on the shoulder, she said, “What has happened? Tell me.”
    “They are dead.”
    “Oh, I’m so sorry.”
    I looked away, at the photographs on the walls. Strangers.
    “What happened?” she said.
    As I sat there on her couch, shivering, stretching my hands out to the fire, feeling that I would never be warm again, I found myself telling her about what had happened to Claudine and Piero.
    When I finished, we were silent for a few moments. “In the end, it was my fault,” I said finally.
    “You are not to blame,” she said. “It was an accident.”
    “No. If I hadn’t persisted in going up to the church, if I hadn’t been so selfish, none of it would have happened. All I could think about was the painting I wanted to make.”
    “None of us can foresee the future.”
    “I put them in danger, and they suffered for it.”
    “And now, this other boy, who is he? I don’t know the islanders much. I’ve only been here a short time myself.”
    “Just a local lad, I suppose. He resembles Piero a bit. That’s all. I’ve been making too much of it.”
    She frowned at me, as if aware that there was more to it than that. “That day I found you lying on the ground at the cliff edge, what happened? You were in pretty rough shape.”
    I looked away and reached for my wineglass, draining what was left. “I came here, to this island, because there was nowhere else to go. And I went to the cliff because I had literally reached the end. At the last moment I heard something behind me and I saw the boy in the mist.”
    “And …?”
    “I thought—I thought it was Piero. And then I fell. I landed on a ledge and eventually managed to climb up. That was when you found me.”
    She blew air out between her pursed lips and shook her head.
    “He saved me in a