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By the time I’ve lugged all three up, I’m sweating through my shirt and panting like a marathon runner.

The huge parcels stand in my living room, still wrapped.

Three impossibly beautiful pieces of Alice in my apartment. Pieces that shouldn’t be in here, because nothing of her should be in here. They all belong with Christopher Otley, just like Bill wants her whole entire life to be.

I lock the front door behind me and rest my head against it.

These paintings can’t really be for me and my apartment. It’s impossible. Even though the odds are stacked up in my favour, we’re still talking sixty grand’s worth of goodwill in bubble wrap.

My mind sways.

Don’t open them.

Open them.

Don’t.

Fuck it. I tear through the wrapping like a man possessed.

The first painting emerges in stages. Greens, deep and lush, like a forest in the land of forever. Beautiful foiling dancing in the abstract branches. That thick, unmistakable line through the centre.

Alice.

All alive in colour and fracture.

I prop it against the wall where Sylvia’s landscape print used to be.

The wall changes. Instantly.

The whole bloody apartment changes, just like that.

The second painting is cooler. Blues and greys and a storm of gold I didn’t appreciate properly at the event because I was too busy trying not to combust from standing near Alice and Jack at the same time. Now I see it. Really see it. There’s something restrained in it, but furious under the restraint. A beautiful violence held under glass manners.

Like Alice.

Like me.

The third one nearly floors me.

It’s one of her red ones. A fire piece. The one Jack stood in front of while pretending to be an art critic. Cocky prick.

These flashes of red are much more tailored and considered than Jack’s splattered effort, but they’re as raw as fresh blood, nonetheless. The red tears across the canvas. Gold splinters through it. The black line anchors it and wounds it at the same time.

I stare until my eyes sting.

These works of art look like they belong here. All three of them.

That’s both the beauty and the pain.

They look as though they were always meant to be here, filling the bare spaces Sylvia left behind. Not because they match. They don’t. My flat is all order and neatness. Calm and unoffensive, while Alice’s paintings are loud and impossible to ignore. They do not blend in.

They make everything else look muted. Sleepy and drained. Because it’s true.

My apartment has been sleepy and drained since long before Sylvia left here, and so have I.

I sink down onto the sofa, staring at the masterpieces.

My skin prickles.