I grab the canvas and hug it. It thumps my chest. Tape peels with a sigh. The corner flops. Paint smears my sweater.Ruining it,I think, and hold tighter.
They spill in: neighborhood boys who show up when they don’t want to go home. They know a kid who knows a kid. Doors open easier when the man with keys is tired. Coats half zipped,breath white, they smell like cheap beer and cold with something mean under both.
“What’s up, Lowe?” the tall one grins. His hat misses his ears. One front tooth leans, so his smile slides sideways. He looks at me like I’m furniture. “Need a place to warm up.”
“You need to be somewhere else,” Mr. Lowe says, not like it will work.
“Ten minutes,” the tall one says, already moving. The others flood in. Three, maybe four. It feels like more. The room shrinks.
They ignore me at first. A boy with a ladder rip in his jeans notices the canvas in my arms. He makes a face like art is a joke and nudges the bottom with his boot, a little kick like I’m hogging a ball.
The canvas slides. My fingers are sweaty. It slaps the table edge, folds like an eyelid.
“Hey,” I almost shout.
They laugh. “What even is that?” one says. “His girlfriend,” another snorts.
Mr. Lowe makes a sound like “Come on,” but he doesn’t step in. He doesn’t pick it up. He doesn’t tell them to stop. His hand twitches toward my shoulder and drops. He looks bored, mad, and tired in one face. “This isn’t art,” he tells me because his words don’t work on them. “This isn’t money. We don’t have room for sentimental rubbish.” He flicks the canvas toward the door like a towel.
It skids and bumps the metal strip where the tile changes. Someone’s soda is still sticky there. The corner drinks it fast. The cheek I painted goes dark and wrong, a bruise spreading.
I move without asking. I drop to my knees and slide my fingers under the dry edge. The canvas is heavier than I wish. I pull it back. The wet corner leaves a shiny smear.
Mr. Lowe’s hand lands firmer on my shoulder, pinning me like a paper. My face goes hot. Tears push, and I tell them no. The boys already turned away, done with me. They head down the hall, leaving salt prints. One bumps my shoulder on purpose. Another tosses, “Nice picture.”
My hands shake and paint sinks deeper into my palm lines.
“Up,” Mr. Lowe says. “Now.”
“I’ll put it away,” I say. “In back. I’ll—”
He exhales, and his hand drops. He watches the boys go, then looks at the dark under her eye where the soda ran. For a second his face softens. Then the rule face returns. “Five minutes,” he says. “Then I want to hear your door.”
He leaves. The door swings, clicks almost shut, swings back a little, and stops. The hall light lays a thin blade on the floor.
I sit on the tile and cradle the picture. My sweater sticks where wet paint kissed it. Tears would be too small for this feeling. This is metal and dust and hot-cold at once. It sits under my ribs where the stolen brushes are, their wood handles warm and stubborn.
My stomach hurts like a string pulled too tight. I put my forehead to the canvas. I hear her voice again:Mix color like you mean it. Don’t say sorry for color.She didn’t teach me what to do when a boy kicks your painting. She didn’t teach me what to do when a grown-up calls what you love trash. Maybe you learn that after they leave.
I curl over the picture and breathe into the canvas. I make a promise in my chest without saying it yet:if small gets me stepped on, I won’t be small. I won’t paint to remember only. I’ll paint so big they can’t pretend not to see. I’ll make marks bleach can’t eat.
Chapter 1 – Aurora
They say success loves a spotlight; I prefer a door I can lock.
Mid-morning light cuts across the studio in long, steady bands, the kind that make dust look organized. The old warehouse settles around me with the weight of brick and steel, a safe kind of heavy. My windows face the harbor; the cranes are just outlines and the gulls are background noise. The air smells like oil paint, turpentine, coffee that went cold, and the ghost of last night’s toast.
I set a fresh palette on the rolling cart. I drop a small pool of linseed oil onto the corner and draw my brush through it. The action is automatic.
The recording in my right earbud clicks from room tone to voice. I know the voice now. I’ve listened to it twenty times and will listen twenty more. She’s forty-five, a nurse, the kind of woman who can start an IV in a moving ambulance. On the tape, she describes a morning that went sideways and never came back. I don’t paint what happened to her. I paint what the aftermath looks like when she sits across from me and chooses to be seen. That’s the agreement. Her story, her words, and my hands.
“Take your time,” my own voice says on the recording. “You can pause whenever you need.”
I load the brush with a thin mix of cadmium and umber. The canvas on the easel is large enough that I have to step back to understand it and step forward to correct it. The face is coming alive in planes and shadows. The left eye needs weight. People think eyes are about the iris. They’re wrong. It’s the lids and the muscle underneath.
The bristles touch down.I hear the nurse laugh on the recording. Not a happy laugh, one of thoseI-can’t-believe-I-lived-through-thatlaughs. It’s a good sound. It reminds me that she’s here, breathing, making coffee, and telling a stranger into a mic what it felt like to keep going.
My phone buzzes on the worktable. It vibrates against a stack of primed boards and travels until the cord stops it. I ignore it. The warmth under the eye is right. The transition needs to be clean. Another buzz. Then a third insistent one. I wipe the brush on the rag, pinch the bristles back into shape, and reach for the phone.
