Page 14 of Graceless

"You were impossible."

"And you're alive. Those are related." I held the clipboard at my side. "I don't have a better answer. Not one you'd believe this morning."

Her jaw did something — an argument assembling, then standing down. She stepped back from the door.

"This isn't over," she said. "I want that on the record."

"Noted."

"Come down. Don't touch anything."

Thirteen steps, narrow. I angled my shoulders at the turn. The ceiling at the bottom was built for the women who'd lived here, and the whole house closed around me like a fist, and the solvents hit — sharp, mineral — and under them, again, her, the warmth of a body that had been working in a closed room, and it went into me and did not come back out, and I had not consented to that, and it did not care.

The saints hit next. Eleven of them, framed, hung at the heights a short woman could reach. Dust on the frames. Paint behind them a different color. I identified seven by iconography before I reached the workbench.

The studio: small. A workbench the length of the south wall, tools in rows worn pale into the wood. Brushes sorted by width, handles out. Scalpels in a roll. Swabs wound by hand — too consistent to be careless, too individual to be bought.

The panel on the easel. Five centuries of silence under tea-colored varnish, and an angel's face looking out of it with great patience.

The painter had guessed. Not well.

"Rules," she said, and set the mug down. "The chair lives by the stairs." She pointed at it — straight-backed, wooden, built for someone a foot shorter than me, worn pale at the arms. "The chair is where security sits. Security does not stand behind me while I work. Security does not touch the workbench. Security does not breathe on five hundred years of gesso. And security absolutely does not offer opinions."

"Understood."

"Good."

I picked up the chair one-handed and moved it eighteen inches left.

"What — no. What are you doing. The chair lives by the stairs, I just said the chair lives —"

"Sightline to the window."

She looked at the window. Looked at the chair. Worked the angle — fast — and the argument died in her jaw.

"Fine." She pointed at the chair like it had testified against her. "Stay."

I sat. The chair took my weight with a sound like a small complaint. She turned to the easel, picked up a swab, dipped it, touched it to the varnish.

She lasted four minutes.

"This is weird." Not turning around. "I want that noted, for the record, additionally. A stranger sitting in my grandmother's kitchen chair watching me clean a painting. Objectively weird."

I said nothing. She had not asked a question.

"Do you do this a lot? Sit in people's houses? Is this a career? Did you go to school for it?"

"No."

"No to which part?"

"All of it."

She turned around. The swab in her right hand, held like someone else would hold a cigarette. And she looked at me — straight on, unhurried, the way she'd looked at the panel — and something in my chest locked. I am not looked at. Passed over, feared, catalogued by things that wanted my name for leverage — but not looked at, not like this, not like a surface someone intended to understand. Four seconds. She did it in four seconds, with paint in her nail beds, and I sat in a dead woman's chair and let her, and was furious, and did not look away.

"You understand 'all of it' isn't an answer," she said. "That's the shape of an answer with nothing inside."

"You asked three questions. The answer to all three is no."