On the sixth day, the high-tide panel began to fill in earnest, and the work took on a steadier rhythm. Tess painted in the mornings, when the light was clearest, and Mara joined her after her first classes, taking over the tasks that kept the work moving without interrupting its centre. Mara learned to mix the exact shade Tess wanted by watching rather than asking, to lay out brushes in the order Tess reached for them, and to step back when Tess needed the wall to herself. It was not the kind of help Mara had imagined when she first promised herself she would protect her sister. It was smaller and harder: holding the ladder steady while Tess reached for a high corner, holding the palette, holding her own urge to fix things that were not broken. Once, when a stroke of blue went wider than Tess had intended, Mara's hand twitched toward the rag, and then she stopped herself. Tess looked at the mark, tilted her head, and turned it into a ripple. Afterwards, Mara did not mention it, and Tess did not need her to.
Mr. Ellis, the caretaker, stopped by that afternoon with a ladder that was sturdier than the one they had been using, and he showed Mara how to lock its feet on uneven ground so that it would not wobble. He spoke in short, practical sentences, and he treated the mural as real work, which it was. He also brought a drop cloth and helped them lay it down so that paint would not stain the pavement, and when he left he said the wall was looking like something worth stopping for, which was the highest praise he gave to anything at the school. Tess, up on the ladder painting the upper curve of a wave, felt her hands steady at the compliment, not because she needed approval but because the wall was beginning to belong to more than just her. It belonged to the mornings Elena spent looking at it, to the friends who rinsed brushes, to the school that walked past it every day.
Word reached them, briefly and without detail, that Cassidy Vale was spending her afternoons at the Greyhaven marine centre as part of a service arrangement, cleaning tanks and helping with the tide pool exhibits. Tess heard it from June Park, who mentioned it in passing while sorting brushes, and then let the subject drop. There was no confrontation, no scene at the wall, no new message or visit. The information sat quietly alongside the painting, like weather in another part of town. Tess thought about it for a moment, and then she thought about the anemone she was painting, and the thought passed. Mara, who might once have gone looking for a confrontation, stayed where she was, holding the ladder. The work in front of them was enough, and the distance between the wall and the marine centre felt, for the first time, like something Tess could choose not to cross.
The seventh day brought a different kind of weather, warm and still, and the paint dried quickly under a sun that made the colours look brighter than they had indoors. Tess worked on the movement of the water itself, layering white over blue in thin, careful strokes to suggest foam and light, and she discovered that the hardest part was knowing when to stop. Too much white and the water looked frozen; too little and it looked flat. Mara sat on the ground below, sorting through sketches Tess had made at the marine centre, and she noticed how many of them showed the same creatures from different angles, as if Tess had been studying not just what they looked like but how they changed. That evening, as they packed up, June Park brought a container of soup from home, and Ana Reyes brought bread, and they ate sitting on the low wall with their legs dangling, paint on their sleeves, talking about ordinary things: a test the next day, a field hockey game, a song June had heard. Willa washed the last brushes in a bucket until the water ran clear, and the sound of it, soft and repetitive, felt like the end of a good day's work.