Empty. The street is empty.
I turn back and walk the rest of the way home. Not faster—I don't let feelings I can't explain change how I move through the world. But more aware. More present. The foster-care radar humming at a frequency I haven't needed in years.
In my apartment, I lock up and change into my sleep shirt. I wash my face, rub lotion into my hands—they're always dry and cracked from the work, and I've started keeping a bottle of the good stuff by the sink because Tess bought it for me and guilted me into using it.
I make chamomile tea and sit on my bed. The apartment is small and cold and mine. On the windowsill, there's a jar of dried lavender that I bought at the farmer's market last summer because I liked the color. Next to it, a postcard Tess sent me from a trip to New Mexico—a desert sunset, gaudy and beautiful. These are my things. My small, chosen comforts.
I think about the sculpture. The gap at the top. The ribs reaching upward, not quite meeting.
I know what the gap is. I've known for a while, but tonight it becomes clear in a way I can't avoid.
The gap is me. The space I keep between myself and everything else. Not because I want to be alone—I don't, not really. I love Tess. I love Cal's gruff kindness. I love Nish's faith in my work. I love the couple I saw on the street tonight, holding hands and laughing about nothing.
I love love. I just don't know how to let it in without also letting in the thing that follows it, which is loss. And I've had enough loss for one lifetime.
So the gap stays open. The ribs reach but don't touch. And the sculpture tells the truth about me whether I want it to or not.
I finish my tea and curl up under the covers. The radiator clanks. The neighbour's TV murmurs through the wall.
I fall asleep thinking about the show. About Nish saying my work deserves to be the first thing people see. About Tess saying my work is extraordinary.
About whether I'm brave enough to believe them.
Chapter 4 - Damien
I've leased the unit across the street.
It took two days. A shell company I set up last year for the East Coast expansion—Stour Capital—signed a six-month lease on a ground-floor commercial space forty meters from her warehouse. The unit has been empty for a year, the owner was happy to take above-market rent with no questions, and the paperwork is buried under enough corporate layers that a forensic accountant would need a month to trace it back to me.
The camera went in on Thursday. A single unit, pinhole, mounted in the window frame behind a sun-bleached notice that the previous tenant left behind. It faces the street and captures a clean view of her cargo door, the pavement in front of the building, and about twenty meters in either direction. Night vision. Motion-activated recording with live feed to my phone.
One camera. External only. Pointed at a public street, which means it's technically legal, which is the kind of distinction that matters to lawyers and means nothing to anyone with a conscience.
I don't have a conscience. I have a methodology. And the methodology requires information, and information requires observation, and observation requires tools.
That's what I tell myself as I sit in my apartment on Friday morning, drinking coffee and watching the feed on my phone. The screen shows an empty street, gray in the early light. Nothing moves. She hasn't arrived yet.
I check the time—7:14 AM. She usually arrives between 7:30 and 8:00, based on the pattern I've established over the past two weeks of personal observation. But this week something has changed. She's been arriving earlier. Stayinglater. Working with an intensity that I can see even from across the street, even through the gap beneath the cargo door—the strobe of the welding torch burning later into the night than before.
Something shifted. I don't know what, but I can see the evidence of it in her routine. The hours have lengthened. The focus has sharpened. She's building toward something.
I have a theory. Last week, my skip-tracing service flagged a fourteen-minute phone call from her number to the gallery—Nish's gallery, the one I've already researched. A fourteen-minute call to a gallery owner who's been courting her for months, followed by an immediate change in her work pattern. It doesn't take a strategist to form a hypothesis.
But a hypothesis isn't confirmation, and I don't act on hypotheses.
So I asked Lena to make enquiries. Nothing aggressive—just a collector's casual interest in an upcoming show at a small East Village gallery. What artists are involved? Is there a preview list? Lena knows people in that world the way I know people in mine—through favors, transactions, the quiet commerce of information.
Her email arrived this morning. The show is in five weeks. Twelve artists. And there, seventh on the list: Jess Rowe.
I read her name on the screen and the feeling that moves through me is so unfamiliar it takes me a moment to identify it.
Pride. I'm proud of her. Proud of a woman I've never spoken to, who doesn't know I exist, who made a decision about her own career that has nothing to do with me.
Followed immediately by something else, something darker and less noble: the knowledge that other people are goingto see her now. She's been mine—invisibly, impossibly mine—for weeks. Mine in the sense that I'm the only one watching, the only one who knows the shape of her days, the only one who's seen her work through the blue-white flare of the welding torch at midnight. And now she's going to walk into a gallery and be seen by strangers. Evaluated. Admired. Wanted.
The jealousy is irrational and total and I despise myself for it.
I set the phone down and go to the window. Manhattan is doing what Manhattan does—churning, indifferent, a machine that runs on money and ambition. My apartment sits above it like an observation deck. Watching without participating. Which is, I'm beginning to understand, the defining condition of my life.
