I stopped chewing.
"The Beaumont oil study. 1843. The one you’ve been trying to acquire for two years from that collector in Geneva who keeps ignoring your emails."
"How did you get…"
"I got it." She leaned back in her chair, radiating satisfaction. "It’s hanging in the VIP lounge. You can see it Saturday. Or never."
Miles laughed. My father shook his head. My mother saw the whole war on my face—the collector versus every nerve ending in my body—and smiled, warm and knowing.
"That’s extortion," I said.
"That’s initiative," Mona corrected. "I learned it from you."
She reached across the table to squeeze my arm. I pulled back before she made contact. Reflex. Not rejection. But the distinction didn’t always land the way I needed it to.
Mona held her hands up. No offense taken. This was us. She pushed. I recoiled. She loved me enough to keep pushing anyway.
"Saturday," she said. "VIP. You can leave after you see the painting."
"Deal," I agreed.
Even though I knew it was a terrible idea.
Saturday night. Reverie.
The club below was a living thing. Bass pounded through the floor and into my teeth, each beat dragging heat up from the crowd in waves I could feel through the soles of my shoes—accumulated body temperature from hundreds of people pressed too close in too little air. Every surface down there would be damp with condensation and spilled liquor and contact I refused to think about.
The VIP section was a different world. Cool air, sparse crowd, space between every seat. Mona had delivered on her promise: clean surfaces, dry glasses, controlled lighting—and on the far wall, under museum-grade spots in a custom frame, the Beaumont oil study.
I stopped walking.
The brushwork alone justified the evening. Layered, unhurried—each stroke visible up close but dissolving into atmosphere from three steps back, less painted than breathed onto the canvas. The shadows weren't filled; they were built, color over color, until the darkness carried actual weight. But it was the light that held me.
A pale wash across the upper third of the canvas that didn't illuminate the subject so much as catch it mid-breath—a moment that existed for seconds, and the painter had found a way to make it exist forever. I stood there for ten minutes, hands behind my back, and for those ten minutes the bass and thebodies and the noise below ceased to exist. There was only the canvas. And the quiet proof that someone had seen something fleeting and refused to let it go.
Miles and Mona bickered behind me about whether the DJ was playing too much house music.
"You have no taste," Mona said.
"I have excellent taste," Miles countered. "That’s the problem."
"Your taste peaked in 2015..."
"2015 was a landmark year."
"For absolutely nothing," Mona cut in sweetly.
I tuned them out. But then my skin started to prickle. The room had gotten warm—too warm—and the bass from below was no longer something I heard. I felt it. A dull thud syncing with my pulse, turning my stomach with every beat. Perspiration at my temples. My fingers itching for the Rubik’s cube. The first signs.
I needed air. Two minutes of quiet. That was all.
"Stepping out," I told Miles.
"You okay?"
"Fine. Two minutes."
I walked down the corridor toward the back of the building, away from the crowd, away from the noise, away from every stimulus that was slowly turning the volume up inside my skull. The hallway was dim and cool and empty, and my breathing evened out with every step.
