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“Four so far.”

“That’ll be more before the night is over. I can think of at least two clients who might be interested in the industrial pieces. I’d like to show them photographs.”

“You want to sell my work?”

“I want to offer my clients something new and fresh that I think they’ll like. That it’s your work is incidental.”

“And here I was thinking you were being nice.”

“I am. I’m just thinking of my commission at the same time.” His expression softened as he surveyed the gallery. “Your mother would have been extremely proud.”

The pain came, familiar but no longer strong enough to hollow me out. Grief had become something I carried rather than something that carried me.

“I think so,” I said.

“She always believed you’d find something you cared about enough to commit to.”

“I found two things.”

Donald followed my gaze to Pascal.

“So I see.” He paused. “Is your father here?”

“He came. He saw. He… left.”

“At least he came.”

“Yeah… all forty-three minutes of it.”

“You timed him?”

I shrugged.

“Forty-three minutes is respectable.”

“He spent fifteen of them taking a phone call.”

“But he came.”

It was irritating when people chose optimism in the face of perfectly good cynicism.

“He bought a painting,” I admitted.

Donald’s eyebrows rose. “Which one?”

“The view from the clinic.”

The painting showed the forest from my bedroom window, dense and dark beneath a bruised sky. In what had started to become my signature, a tall shadow stood between the trees, so faint that most people didn’t notice it. I hadn’t tested Laura on that one yet.

“Perhaps he understands more than you give him credit for,” Donald said.

“Let’s not get carried away.”

When a couple who knew him drew him into conversation, I took the opportunity to slip away.

Pascal appeared at my side almost immediately. “How did it go with Remy?” he asked.

“Better than expected.”