“No, no, not at all. Does it look like a fake to you?”
I wasn’t an art historian, so there was no way for me to know for sure, but as I stared at the painting, I felt the brushstrokes of the painter’s hand, my own muscle memory of it. My fingers hovered over the painting. Looking at her, I felt a deep tenderness and longing.
God, how I loved her.
“Do you remember her name?” Van Laar asked me.
The name bubbled up from deep within me, as if it’d been sunk at the bottom of a wellspring these many years.
“Simone,” I breathed. The two paintings blurred together until they became one in my mind. The ghost laugh tickled my ears like church bells. Her skin smelled like lilacs.
He’s going to ruin you.
Melissa had warned me about her, about him. Simone. Andre. My muse. They were one and the same.
It took me so goddamned long to find you, Melissa had said. A talent like mine didn’t come along in a hundred years, maybe not even two hundred years.
“Do you believe in past lives, Martin?” Van Laar asked me.
The blood drained from my head, the room spun on its axis, and I felt myself diving into Van Laar’s plush wine-colored carpet.
16. Breathing
WHEN Icame to, Andre and Nicky were loading me into the limousine while Van Laar stood in the doorway, waving good-bye, the grotesque smile stretched across his ancient face.
“Martin,” Andre said. “Jesus, man. You scared the shit out of me.”
They laid me out in the backseat of the limousine. Nicky and Andre fussed over me, demanding I drink water. Andre placed a cool cloth to my forehead and patted my thigh, but I just lay there staring blankly at the blackout windows.
“I must have had too much to drink,” I murmured drowsily. I’d had very little to drink.
“Whatever you said to Van Laar did the trick,” Nicky said, oozing smugness. “I’ve never sold an unknown’s work for as much money before.”
“Did you see the painting?” I asked. “Bonnaire’s?”
Nicky gazed at me with curiosity. “I saw your painting. That was it.”
“There was another one, by an artist named Martin Bonnaire.”
“Bonnaire is a myth,” Nicky said, shaking his head with condescension. “Some art historian in the nineteenth century invented him. He never existed.”
I didn’t know what to say, except that I knew what I saw. I glanced up at Andre and saw the flicker of Simone’s face staring back at me. Except she looked at me with abject terror—eyes wide, mouth opened as if trapped in a scream. I’d dreamed her face before.
“I’m going to be sick.” I reached for the champagne bucket just in time to collect the refuse of my dinner.
“Martin, you all right?” Andre rubbed my back, the space between my shoulder blades. I took off my coat and loosened my tie. He looked freaked out as well, which only intensified my anxiety.
Nicky patted his leg. “He’ll be fine, Simone. Don’t worry about it.”
“Did you just call him Simone?” I demanded. I was losing my mind.
“What? No? Why would I call him that?”
Andre looked at me fearfully, and I pressed my palms over my eyes, trying to erase her face from my mind. What did all this mean? I tried to comprehend it, my nightmare, the ghost memories, and those paintings.
Simone.
Andre.
