“I set terms,” I say. “No creative oversight or using me to polish their PR. Opt-out if anything puts my participants at risk. We can add no introductions without consent to the list.”
“It’s already there,” she says. “I wrote it into the email thread when you weren’t looking.”
I look at her because I want to hug her and I’m not going to do that here. “Okay.”
“Okay.” She tilts her head toward the left. “Critic at nine o’clock. Be kind. He can be useful. Keep your answers short. No jargon.”
“My notes say the same thing,” I tell her, which is true, and then she is gone, moving toward a woman with a bob and a notebook, ready to charm and defend with the same smile.
I move to the first canvas and stand a step away so people can see it close up. It’s the nurse—the laugh that isn’t about jokes, the set of the mouth that says I keep going. In this light, the left eye holds exactly the weight it should. A photographer angles his camera, and I feel the instinct to turn out of the frame, then stop. I learned this rule the hard way:if you don’t stand with your work, someone else will stand in your place and start explaining you.
“Ms. Hale?” A man with a museum badge and a tie that cost real money holds his hand out like a polite spear. A tall wiry lady I'm guessing is his assistant stands beside him with a tablet in her hand. “I am with Mirrow. We’re very glad to see this in person.”
“Thank you,” I say, and shake his hand. His skin is warm, dry, and forgettable. “We kept the palette honest. The room deserves honesty.”
“It does,” he says. “Can you talk a bit about how you approach consent in your process? We’re considering programming around trauma-informed practices.”
“I ask permission first. I don’t paint anyone who didn’t choose to be seen. I don’t use names. I send images to participants before anything goes on a wall. If they say no, it’s a no. There’d no negotiation.”
He nods like he wants to like me. His assistant smiles with her mouth closed. The photographer shoots past my shoulder and I keep my face neutral.
A critic appears. I know him by posture and the haircut that wants to be younger. He’s written essays that convinced people to buy work they didn’t understand so they could lie to themselves and say that they did.
“Powerful show,” he says. “The faces are arresting. There’s a rumor,” he adds, dropping his voice for the intimacy of theater, “that you’ve been consulting with certain underground clinics. Off-the-books therapy spaces. Is that true?”
“There are rumors?” I ask lightly.
“You know how it is,” he shrugs. “You don’t get this kind of specificity from imagination. Who are your sources?”
“I talk to people who want to talk to me,” I say. “If they want to be anonymous, they are. If they want to be invisible, they stay that way.”
“So you won’t name the clinics.”
“I paint art, not crime maps,” I grit out. My smile tightens at the corners and I let it. “This isn’t exposé. It’s portraiture.”
He takes a breath to argue and then changes his mind because someone more useful to him taps his arm. He peels away. I take a slow sip of champagne, so I have something to do. The flute trembles a little and I make my grip lighter. One trick they teach runners and people who stand in doorways waiting for a man to stop banging on it:relax your hands. Tight hands tell the rest of your body to panic.
“Big night.” A collector I recognize leans in for a cheek kiss and doesn’t get it. He recovers without resetting his smugness. “The palette is so restrained. It takes confidence to hold back. Selfie?” He raises his phone before I answer.
I step into the frame because saying no will cost me three minutes of damage control later. The camera clicks. He posts it while we’re still standing there and tags me, the gallery, and the museum in a list that already has tomorrow’s headlines in it. He leaves without saying he loved the work. He doesn’t love work. He loves owning it.
“Ms. Hale.” Another journalist, this one from a smaller paper that writes well and pays badly. “Can you talk about themural adaptation—the large piece at the end? The motif along the baseboard looks like a hospital strip, but not quite.”
“It pulls from medical spaces, yes,” I say. The detail she’s pointing at is a thin band curving along the bottom edge of the canvas, a color and pattern that would mean nothing to most people and too much to the wrong ones. It’s taken from a safe wing I’ve seen with my own eyes only once and never talked about. A place where doors click, where permission is literal. I kept it abstract in the painting. “Hospitals never mean just one thing to anyone who’s been in one. I wanted the room to read like a place that could hold or hurt depending on who stood there.”
“Did you interview clinicians?” she asks.
“I interview people,” I say. “Some of them are clinicians.”
She waits like she wants to press. I don’t give her the space. “I appreciate you noticing the baseline,” I add. “Most people look at faces and forget the room on purpose.”
She writes that down and I let her.
My name moves like a ripple. The cameras pop. The tiles reflect. The smell of perfume tries to sit on top of the paint and doesn’t quite make it. I keep tracking the big piece on the far wall, because I’m proud of it and because if anyone asks for a story I won’t give, it will be here. The mural translation holds a detail only a Sanctuary insider would recognize. If you don’t know, it’s a color choice. If you do, it’s a code. I want it there for the people who need to see themselves in something that doesn’t use their face. I know I’m taking a risk, but I put it up anyway.
Zoe catches my eye and makes a small circle with her finger. It means take a lap, shake five hands, then meet me by the sculpture in the side room for breathing. I nod. She disappears again. She’s everywhere at once—directing a photographer to shoot to the right so we don’t get glare, peelinga donor off a journalist, and handing a water to a woman whose heels are a mistake she won’t admit until she gets home.
Halfway through the lap, I feel a pressure. A line across my skin that makes the hair on my arms rise. Attention that isn’t admiration. It’s clinical, like being weighed.
