Afternoon light shifted through the windows. The light deepened to gold. Her phone buzzed on the couch cushion.
Mom.
She picked up on the third ring. “Hey.”
“Are you eating?”
“Yes.”
“Real food or ‘artist food’?”
Lumi glanced at the empty pastelito bag. Technically a pastry counted as real food. It had flour in it. Flour was a grain. Grains were a food group. “Real food.”
“What kind of real food?”
“What’s artist food?”
“Anything you can eat with one hand while the other hand holds a brush.” Ozara’s voice carried the quiet warmth of a mother who had raised two children and learned that the direct approach worked on Keanu and the flanking maneuver worked on Lumi. “Your father used to eat entire sandwiches sideways during his banking days. It was disturbing. I don’t want that for you.”
Lumi smiled despite herself. Sideways sandwiches. She’d inherited more from her dad than financial discipline. The man could eat a burrito while reviewing spreadsheets without dropping a single grain of rice. It was, honestly, impressive.
“How are you sleeping?”
“Fine.”
“How many hours?”
“Several.”
“Lumi.”
“Four. Ish.”
Ozara didn’t push. That was the thing about her mother—she knew when pushing would make Lumi dig in harder. She changed direction with the practiced ease of a woman who’d spent twenty years consulting for artists with egos the size of their talent.
“I’m proud of you.”
The words landed in a soft place Lumi hadn’t braced for. Her throat tightened. She pressed her thumbnail into the palm of her free hand.
“For sleeping four hours?”
“For all of it. The work. The fight. The way you keep going.” She paused. “You don’t have to do it all alone, honey.”
Yes, I do. That’s the whole point.
“I know, Mom. I love you too.”
They talked for another ten minutes. Ozara didn’t mention the Axan Dark collaboration. Didn’t mention publishing or distribution or any of the words that would have made Lumi’s walls go up. She asked about the convention prep. About Moriarty’s newest growth spurt. About whether Keanu had sent over the updated contract language for her merchandise licensing.
After they hung up, Lumi sat with the phone in her ink-smudged hands and studied the wall where her mother’s latest gift hung—an early work by an artist Ozara had discovered before anyone else. The brushstrokes were bold and unafraid. Ozara had given it to her the week after the Harlan disaster, without explanation. Lumi had understood anyway: This is what courage looks like in paint. Don’t forget.
Evening fell in layers.Gold to amber to the blue-gray of a Brooklyn dusk.
She’d worked through the afternoon—finishing the repaired panel, starting layouts for a convention-exclusive print, answering three emails from indie shops requesting restocks. The loft darkened around her in increments she didn’t noticeuntil the pendant lamps clicked on their timer and her world shifted from daylight to lamplight.
She’d heated a can of soup at some point. The bowl sat half-finished on the kitchen counter. Progress.
Now she sat cross-legged on the couch in the warm pool of lamplight, her brush behind her ear, the loft humming with the quiet of a space that knew her rhythms. The Nightbloom pages were pinned to the corkboard above her desk, Sable’s face repeated in various stages of transformation—rage, grief, power, isolation. A woman who poured her entire capacity for love into the single thing she chose to protect, and destroyed everything else.
