I tell myself this as I send the email. Tell myself this as I close the laptop and stand at the window and look out at the city I'm supposed to be conquering.
I tell myself that what I'm doing is different. More controlled. More deliberate. That choosing this path with open eyes is fundamentally distinct from stumbling down it blind. That self-awareness is a form of inoculation—if I know what I'm becoming, I can manage it. Contain it. Direct it.
The sculptures watch me from their positions in my apartment. The shattered mirror. The iron fist that might be a flower. Honest objects in a dishonest space, made by honest hands that don't know they're being watched.
I look at my own hands. Still steady. No tremor. The hands of a man who is in complete control of himself and his circumstances.
I'm not Nathan Hale.
I'm something worse. Because Nathan fell into his obsession the way a man falls off a cliff—without choosing, without planning, carried by forces he couldn't name or resist. He was a victim of his own compulsion, and there's a kind of innocence in that, however perverse.
I'm choosing this. Deliberately. With full knowledge of what it is and where it leads. Every step I take toward Jess Rowe is a step I've calculated, evaluated, and elected to take.
That doesn't make it better. I know that.
I'm choosing it anyway.
Chapter 3 - Jess
I called Nish.
It took me two days after Tess's visit to work up the nerve, which is ridiculous, because it's a phone call. Artists call galleries. Galleries show art. This is how it works. But my hands were shaking when I dialled, and when he picked up on the first ring, I almost hung up.
"Jess." I could hear the smile in his voice. "Tell me this is the call I think it is."
"I want to do the show."
He was quiet for a beat. Just one. Then, very softly: "Good. It's about time."
He didn't gush or celebrate or make it a bigger deal than it needed to be, which is one of the reasons I trust him. Nish understands that for me, saying yes to this was like stepping off a ledge, and he wasn't going to make noise while I was still looking down.
We talked logistics. Wall space, lighting, freight elevator access for the large piece. He wants me near the entrance—prime position, maximum foot traffic. I said anywhere was fine, and he said no, anywhere was not fine, because my work deserved to be the first thing people saw when they walked in.
Nobody's ever said anything like that to me before. I had to press the phone against my ear and breathe for a second before I could answer.
That was four days ago. The show is in six weeks, and I've been working long hours since, trying to finish the sculpture and also not think too much about the fact that in six weeks,strangers are going to stand in front of something I made from the most honest part of myself and decide what it's worth.
I'm trying not to spiral about it. Some days I succeed.
This morning I'm at the bodega before heading to the studio. Same bodega I've been coming to for four years—Hector behind the counter, radio playing something in Spanish, coffee for a dollar fifty in a blue paper cup. I like this place. I like that Hector remembers I take mine black with two sugars without me having to say it. I like the way the morning light comes through the front window and makes everything look warmer than it is.
Small things. I've always loved small things. When you grow up without much, you learn to notice the beauty in what's ordinary. The way steam rises from a coffee cup. The color of brick in early light. The sound of rain on a metal roof, which might be my favorite sound in the world after the hiss of a welding torch.
I'm waiting for my coffee when I notice the man.
He's near the door, looking at his phone. Tall—noticeably tall—with dark hair and a coat that doesn't belong in this neighborhood. Everything about him is precise. The way he stands. The way his thumb moves across his phone screen. Even the way he holds his coffee cup—carefully, like he's aware of it as an object rather than just drinking from it.
He's striking. I notice that the way I notice most things—quickly, the artist's eye cataloguing details before the conscious mind catches up. The line of his jaw. The way his coat sits on his shoulders. He looks like he was assembled by someone who understood proportion.
He doesn't look up. I take my coffee from Hector and pass the man on my way out. I catch a scent—something clean, something that probably costs more than my weekly groceries.It's nice. Unexpectedly nice, in a bodega that smells like coffee and fried plantains.
Outside, the cold hits my face and I hunch into my jacket, already thinking about the sculpture. The man slips from my mind like water off metal.
The studio is freezing. The space heater wheezes to life and I give it twenty minutes before I strip off my outer layers and pull on the gloves. The sculpture is waiting, and I've been thinking about the upper ribs all night—the way they need to taper, to thin out as they rise, so the whole structure feels like it's reaching rather than enclosing.
I fire up the welder and lose myself.
This is the part people don't understand about making things—the joy of it. Not the tortured-artist suffering, not the existential crisis of creative vision. Just the plain, physical joy of material responding to intention. The steel gets hot and it bends, and I decide where it bends, and something that didn't exist before starts to exist, and that is genuinely, uncomplicatedly wonderful. Even on the bad days. Even when I'm broke and tired and eating ramen for the fourth night in a row. The making itself is good.
