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"Please find your seats," she says, with a sing-song cadence. "And don’t forget to vote for your favorite painting at the end! We have some very exciting prizes tonight."

The very exciting prizes are clearly visible on the table behind her: a gift basket of generic chocolate, a set of golf balls, and a ceramic cat that looks like it’s seen some things.

Baryn pours two plastic cups of wine and hands me one with a flourish. "To making memories," he says.

I snort, but tap my cup against his.

Simon and Tamsin peel off immediately, beelining for the snack table. I watch as Tamsin fills a paper plate with cheese cubes and olives, somehow arranging them into what looks like a disturbingly anatomically accurate human skeleton.

She holds out one hand without looking away from the plate. “Fibula?”

Simon stares at her for approximately half a second, then selects a rectangular piece of cheese from the tray and drops it into her palm.

“Too long.”

He replaces it with another.

Tamsin positions it beside its counterpart. “Better.”

She notices me staring. “What?”

“Nothing.”

She eats the patella.

Baryn leads me to a pair of easels set up against the far wall, where a woman in a paint-stained smock is explaining the evening’s assignment: a scenic barn under a starry sky.

"This feels like a hostage situation," I mutter.

"Think of it as an exercise in perspective," Baryn says, squeezing a line of blue paint onto his palette.

I dip the brush into the paint and draw a line across the canvas, thick and unrepentant. "You realize I’m just going to reconstruct the barn as an unsolved arson, right?"

"I’m counting on it," he says with a wink that makes the pit of my stomach flutter.

By the time I finish blocking in the roof, Baryn has somehow acquired an audience.

This is not surprising. Baryn can extract a life story from someone waiting beside him at a crosswalk. Give him wine and a captive population of Stillwater residents over sixty and there is no secret in this room that’s making it out alive.

It starts with the building itself.

The woman painting on his other side mentions that her husband helped replace the rec hall roof sometime in the nineties. Baryn asks if everyone in Stillwater has known everyone else forever. She tells him mostly. He asks what it was like growing up here. Someone across the table starts listing businesses that no longer exist.

Within five minutes, they've covered the old pharmacy, two mayors, a bowling alley that burned down under suspicious circumstances, and three separate divorces.

Then Baryn asks, “what about the Living Water Fellowship? Has that always been here?”

“Oh, Lord.” The woman beside him puts down her brush with a sigh. “Vernard.”

The name travels through the surrounding area with a ripple of recognition, and Baryn glances up from his canvas with an expression of polite curiosity I recognize as entirely manufactured.

“Pastor Scofield?” he asks.

“Wasn’t always Pastor Scofield, you know.” She takes a sip of wine. “Before he found Jesus, he spent most of his time finding trouble.”

The woman across from us laughs. “And other people’s wives.”

“Now, I didn’t say that.” Her expression suggests she considered the distinction largely technical. “He drank, gambled, got himself into trouble more often than not. Then one day he found religion, and somehow everybody was supposed to forget the previous twenty years.”