Picture Perfect

Chapter Twenty-Six - Elliot

Hi all, apologies for the two-day delay on this! Can you believe we're only 10 chapters away from the end?! Plus an epilogue of course.

Love, Cam

♡

Chapter Twenty-Six

Elliot

I whistled. "You've not been through these since...?"

Tyler grimaced, edging his way around a bundle of large canvases. "Some of them since the separation, others...lord, it's been years. I was going to go through them all before we moved, so I could cut down our moving costs a bit, but..."

He pulled a face that I took to mean 'I was busy with Saskie and dealing with the ending of my marriage, so I didn't really have time to emotionally wrench myself apart'.

"Well, no time like the present," I said, and nodded to the bundles of larger canvases. "If we start with the bigger stuff, we'll start freeing up space a bit faster."

Tyler nodded. This was the basement, and neither of us particularly wanted to hang out in the basement forever. I had already spotted three spiders hanging out in the corners of the room, and I didn't much fancy getting to know them any better.

"Okay, I'll pick one up at a time, you decide, and then I'll hand them to you to put into piles," I said, and then eyed the stairs going back up to a non-spidered environment. "I'll put the ones you want to throw by the stairs so we can take them up and sort out getting rid of them."

Tyler nodded. "I'll remove the canvases from the frames before I throw them, no sense wasting canvas frames."

I had absolutely no idea how one re-used a canvas frame, but I would leave that to the experts. "Gotcha. Right. How about this one?"

I chose a landscape, hoping that it was a nice easy start and not likely to drag up horrible memories. Tyler smiled. "I'll keep that one, it was the first big canvas I ever did, at school."

I eyed with a fresh perspective. "Damn, it's really good, especially for being so young."

"Thanks," he beamed, and even the basement couldn't dull that shine. I handed it to him, and he put it in the 'keep' pile.

"Right," I picked another at random. "How about this one?"

Tyler pulled a face, and I looked at it to see Colin's face smiling back out at me. "I shall take delight in stabbing him in the face as I rid the canvas frame of the canvas," he replied, and I tossed it towards the stairs gladly.

"Ha, this one is adorable," I laughed as I picked up one of Sorcha and baby Saskie. "You should have this hanging in the flat. God, does Sorcha age, like at all? She looks exactly the same."

"No, she's always going to look like that," Tyler grinned, and put it next to him. "You're right, I'll hang this upstairs, Saskie will think it's hilarious."

Baby Saskie, toddler Saskie, and child Saskie were frequent models of the artwork, although Tyler laughed and said most were worked from memory and photographs, because Saskie never sit still long enough for an actual life portrait.

"Especially once she learned how to run," Tyler said, and the ghost of something passed over his face. "God, once she learned how to run..."

I laughed. "I know that one well. Half of my job is stopping them running."

After twenty minutes, we had a solid 'keep' pile consisting mostly of Saskie, Tyler's parents, Siobhan, Sorcha, and some animal and flower paintings of species native to Ireland. We also had a solid 'throw' pile, mostly consisting of Colin, even the ones that also had Saskie, and older paintings that Tyler didn't hate, but didn't love.