A shiver ran down my spine. With a voice like that, I bet it was easy for him to get anyone to listen to him.
“Um.” I tucked a strand of hair behind my ear. “When I look at it, I feel uncertainty. To me, it’s about the moment just before marriage. When you’re still yourself, but you know everything is about to change.” My throat tightened. “You expect to become someone new, but you hope the person you’re marrying will still make room for the parts of you you’re not ready to give up.”
My words filled the air between us, fluttering through the silent room like pages torn from someone’s diary.
Too much. Why did I say all that to a stranger?
“What about you?” I asked, eager to shift the attention off me. “What does it make you feel?”
“Nothing.”
A strange agitation skated beneath my skin. “Nothing?”
A beat. “Nah.”
Awkward. I’d definitely overshared, and he clearly had no intention of doing so himself. I’d come back later, when he was gone, and enjoy the painting again in solitude.
My hands twitched as I tried to find some excuse to escape without making it seem like I was running away.
For God’s sake, I was the organizer. There were a million things I could say I needed to do.
“I should go check on?—”
“Actually, there’s something.”
“Oh?” Relief filtered through me. I glanced over my shoulder to find the man had moved closer, but he was still in the shadows. Still hard to make out.
“It makes me feel…wonder,” he said.
I nodded encouragingly. “I can see that. Definitely.”
“Makes me wonder why anyone would spend money on an unfinished painting.”
My heart stuttered.What?“It’s not unfinished.”
“She hadn’t even covered the canvas.”
“That’s on purpose.”
“Seems like she ran out of paint.”
A flabbergasted laugh bubbled up from me. “She didn’t run out of paint. Frankenthaler was highly regarded even in her own lifetime. This isn’t some hack.”
“Sure seems like it to me.”
I glanced toward him again. More like glared. He was standing just on the edge of where the shadows began to recede.
Walk away. Grab another champagne. Forget about him.
“It has no artistic value,” he said in a definitive tone that made it sound like he was the world’s expert on the topic. “No demonstration of skill. A scam. I wonder what convinced Messero to buy it.”
Not what. Who.
Don’t listen to him.
But doubt had slipped in. What if this man was right? What if this had been a bad choice on my part, and everyone but me, Rafe, and Cleo knew it? Had I embarrassed my brother without even realizing it? Had he made a bad mistake trusting me with this?
No, this guy was wrong. He was dismissing the painting outright without even trying to understand. “If all you see when you look at this is an unfinished canvas, I’m afraid you have a poverty of imagination,” I muttered.
