Page 101

I dip my brush into paint.

Then pause.

I don't know what I'm painting.

Yesterday it was the water. The light. The safe things. Today my hands want something else, and I'm not sure I trust them with the freedom.

I touch brush to canvas anyway and let instinct lead.

Color first.

Then shape.

Then light.

But not the sea this time.

Something darker. A vertical line. Then another. The suggestion of glass. A figure building itself out of memory before I can stop it.

I don’t realize how much time has passed until the sun has shifted enough to change the shadows on the stone beside me and my coffee has gone lukewarm.

My hand aches in the most satisfying way.

There's a smear of cobalt on my thumb, another streak of white across the side of my wrist, and I don't think I've felt this peaceful in years.

"Interesting choice of subject."

I jerk so hard the brush nearly slips from my fingers.

I look up.

Gabriel stands there—the gallery owner from yesterday, the man with the card I tucked into my satchel and thought about for an hour after he walked away. Another linen shirt today, sleeves rolled, sunglasses hanging from the placket. He's holding two takeaway cups and a paper-wrapped baguette like he just stepped out of some aggressively European ad campaign designed to make people fall in love with Italy and carbohydrates.

He smiles when I blink at him.

"You came back," he says, like he knew I would.

"You found me," I say, like I'm not slightly unnerved by the fact that he did.

"You are not difficult to find." He crouches down beside me and offers one of the coffees and the baguette. "A woman painting alone on the promenade tends to stand out."

I take them automatically. "You didn't have to do this."

"I know," he says. "That is why it is charming."

I laugh under my breath and set the coffee beside me.

Then I look back at the canvas, and go still.

A faceless man in a dark suit stands at a penthouse window with a phone pressed to his ear. Broad shoulders. Rigid posture.

A sense of stillness so tense it feels like the whole figure is holding itself together by force.

I stare at it.

At him.

At the exact outline of Everett Kauffman looking back at me from the canvas without a face and without permission.