I wait until she’s three people deep in a conversation with a smaller paper, then tilt my head to the left. “Bring him,” I say, and walk the back stairs down to the office that doubles as shipping hub and bad coffee station. My curator counterpart,the gallery owner, plays it correctly: knocks once, leaves the door partially open, stays in the hall and doesn’t pretend we’re anything other than what we are.
She stands in the doorway with one foot in the corridor. Her posture doesn’t give me what most men ask for. She keeps the distance and dictates the terms without announcing it. She says her boundaries before I can say anything else: gallery, foundation, no negotiations on the floor. I tell her we heard her. Her conditions stand. I warn her about speed without telling her how fast I can make things go. I don’t give her a name. I don’t ask for one. Not giving her a name is a courtesy and a tactic. Names become handles. Handles get used for dragging. I keep mine to myself until I decide what to do with the weight attached to it.
Upstairs again, the smoked glass gives me my reflection over her anchor piece. My face aligns with the painted jawline for a second. Reflections overlap when the angle lines up. I step half a foot left because I don’t like seeing that.
A photographer moves in on her from the left with an angle that will catch her mid-blink and read as fatigue. “Left,” I murmur. My aide intercepts, one hand raised in polite direction. The photographer adjusts and gets the shot from ten degrees higher and two feet back. It will make her look like a person who stands with her work instead of a person on trial. He won’t know why he changed his mind. He will think it was his idea. That’s fine. People do better when they think it was theirs.
I log each small intervention the way I’d log doses and reactions. Not because I’m keeping a scorecard I expect her to balance, but because the work scales. You keep a person safe by removing the twenty things that make the one big thing possible.
The security channel goes quiet for a minute and the only sound in my ear is the echo of the mezzanine buzzing the room. Quiet is when people think they can relax and when bad decisions multiply. I don’t relax. I use the minute to walk theedge of the mezzanine and read the canvases at a distance the way buyers read them: surface, edge, title card. The titles are direct, not cute. Names like “After Morning,” “Not the Incident,” “On Running,” “Consent First.”
At “On Running,” the light hits the impasto in the cheek where she pulled the paint up to hold the feeling of breath hitting air. It isn’t thick for show; it’s thick where the form needs to turn. At “Not the Incident,” the skin over the knuckle shows four short strokes to indicate swelling. Most people won’t see it; the ones who need to will. At “Consent First,” the edges around the eye are scored lightly with the back of the brush where the lid folds and takes on a weight it didn’t have the day before. She’s not a delicate painter. She’s precise. Precision is a better safety measure than delicacy.
I signal my left-side aide. “When the crowd thins, do a loop of the back corridors. Check the office door locks. Confirm the building’s back stairs camera has a recording of the hour. Pull any angles with dark coats near the mezzanine rail—send to me tonight; to operations in the morning.”
“Yes, sir.”
***
In the parking alcove, the sea air comes in hard again. It carries salt and cold and the smell of a rope that’s been wet too long. I don’t stand in it. I don’t like standing still. I get into the car that waits three doors down from hers and click the earpiece off. Silence is better when it’s chosen.
My driver looks at me in the rearview mirror like the question is always the same and the answer never changes. “Home or the house?”
“The house,” I say. “We’ll be on at 10:00. Call at 10:30. Run a sweep for dark coats near the mezzanine rail between 7:30 and 8:15. Send anything interesting direct. And call the gallery’s head of security in the morning. Thank him for the backstairs camera. Ask him if he wants a replacement on our dime, commercial grade, no questions asked.”
“Yes, sir.”
The car pulls into traffic. The gallery disappears behind the curve of the harbor road. The cranes keep their shape against the sky. My hands are steady on my knees. I flex them anyway to remind them that they are not for breaking. That isn’t the work anymore. The work is closing doors before men who like open rooms walk through them.
In the dark of the car, with the earpiece off and the street noise filtered to a level that sounds like distance, I let the sentence I didn’t say upstairs run once, so it stops trying to push its way out of the part of my head where I keep it.
She holds her breath when she’s scared. She’ll hold it again for me. Not yet. But soon.
Chapter 5 – Aurora
The elevator lurches like it always does on rainy nights, stops an inch low, and makes me step up into the hallway. The building smells like wet wool and someone’s dinner. The stairwell door bangs two floors below and echoes up the concrete throat. I move down the corridor with my coat half-buttoned and my heels looped through two fingers. My toes are cold. I don’t fix it here. I want to be inside the studio before I put anything back on my feet.
My key sticks, then turns. The door opens to the dark I left before the opening. I step in, shoulder the door shut with my hip, slide the deadbolt, and lock the chain. The ritual is muscle at this point: I count the locks in my head and feel each click like a bead. The room answers with the smells I know of linseed and old coffee, a thread of turpentine that sits low in the air no matter how often I open the windows, and tonight, rain through old wood.
I drop my clutch on the worktable. The white card slides out and tilts against the edge, so the lamp catches it. The black letters look newer under this light. The corner is still bent from my palm. Ink left a small gray ghost on the side of my hand I didn’t scrub in the gallery bathroom. I pick the card up, flip it once, flip it back, and set it down face down like that will quiet it. It doesn’t. My eyes keep returning to the small white rectangle.
I shrug out of the coat and hang it on the hook by the door. The slip feels too thin now that adrenaline has gone soft. I carry my shoes to the chair and set them on the seat to dry. I’m still riding the crash with my head bright, stomach hollow, and my legs unsteady in a way other people would call tired and I call field clearance. After a show, the mind wants to list and re-list. I let it for a minute.
I handled the critics. I refused to say the name of any place that doesn’t want me to say it. I gave “brushwork” as an answer until they stopped trying to make me give them blood. The museum saw what they needed to see. The donors stood where light made them feel important. The foundation played it clean, or clean enough, except for “anonymous” wanting a face in a back office. I kept two feet under me. I did not make speeches. I did the job.
And still, tonight was not just networking. It had a direction. Someone’s schedule. A person with time and a plan. I keep thinking that and then telling myself I’m being dramatic. I don’t like the second voice. The first voice survived places where you get in trouble for naming things. It’s trying to keep me honest.
I turn on the lamp over the kitchen counter. It throws a pool of soft light onto the sketchbook I left open this morning: a graphite outline of a jaw and a curve of hair that reads real even in quick lines.
I move through the studio in a slow circle. Then, I take the card back to the worktable and lay it on the sketchbook. It looks out of place there. The number on the back is neat and even. The letters—For your safety—are block print without flourish. The ink smudged where my palm sweat met the corner in the restroom and left a gray thumb crescent. It’s mine now whether I want it or not.
I tell myself to shower before I think more. I don’t move. I find that I am listening for something that isn’t the building: a footstep in my own room or a foreign vibration. It’s silly and it’s not at the same time. I put my hand on the back of the chair and breathe steady. The edges of the room come back in an order I like.
I cross to the supply cabinet to put away the travel kit I keep for days like today. The cabinet door sticks. I give it thenudge it needs, and the smell of old wood and oil rolls out. On the second shelf, where I line the brushes I cleaned this morning, one lies on the wrong angle. The ferrule points toward the back instead of forward. It’s a small, stupid thing only I would clock this fast. I always lay them to dry with the bristles over the edge, handles on the shelf. This one sits fully on the wood. I set it back on the edge to fix the line and stop. The bristles are damp.
I didn’t use this brush after I cleaned it. I can feel it in the hair—the stick of turpentine not mine, the wet that doesn’t belong to daytime. I put it down, my spine cold. I look at the shelf closely, at the tiny drag of a handle through dust I meant to wipe yesterday and didn’t. Across the room, on the concrete near the back door, there is a faint oval darker than the floor. A half shoe print, thin like water dried and left a memory. It is angled toward the door and isn’t mine.
I don’t move for a full count of eight. My stomach goes tight in that way that makes you breathe into your back. The room feels louder because the idea of someone else’s weight is still here even if their body is not. I lock the panic down the way I learned at twelve and sixteen and yesterday: we isolate, sequence, and don’t run without a list.
