Page 35 of His Vow

She pulled me up to her. Her mouth found mine. Her legs wrapped around me. I pressed into her slowly, watching her face. She held my face in both hands and looked at me while I moved.

Every barrier I'd built went silent. The calculation and the control I'd maintained since twenty-two — none of it survived her hands on my face and her eyes on mine. There was only this. Her warmth. Her trust.

After.

She was asleep. Curled toward me, one hand on my chest, her breathing slow. The curl had fallen across her forehead. A paint stain — cerulean blue — marked the inside of her wrist.

The apartment was dark. The air smelled like rosemary and vanilla. The sheets held two people for the first time.

The Helios file was in the next room. The second phone was in my jacket on the kitchen chair. Hugh's handshake sat behind my eyes.

I looked at her. The curl. The paint stain. The hand on my chest, rising and falling with my breathing.

I don't want to lose this.

Then the cold voice. The one I built at twenty-two.

You were never supposed to have this.

ELEVEN

SOLEIL

"Soleil, what if the entire east wall is the migration? The journey. And then the west wall is the arrival. The viewer walks through the room and physically moves from one to the other."

Rafael's voice was buzzing through my phone on speaker, propped against a jar of brushes on the floor. I was barefoot on butcher paper spread across the gallery, a pencil behind my ear, a coffee cup balanced on my knee, Post-it notes stuck to every surface within reach — the floor, the wall, and the edge of my shoe.

"I love that." I sketched a rough rectangle on the paper. "But the sight lines need to work. If migration is east, the first thing people see when they walk in is departure. That's heavy. We might want the arrival at the entrance and let them walk backward into the leaving."

"Walk backward into the leaving." He was quiet for a second. "That's better. That's much better. Because then the whole room is about return."

"Exactly." I drew an arrow. Crossed it out. Drew another. "How many pieces are we talking?"

"Fourteen. Maybe sixteen. I have three that aren't finished, but I think — Soleil, I think this could be twice the size of the first show."

His voice had changed in two months. The man who walked into my gallery with shaking hands and paint under his nails now talked about his work as if he trusted it. I set the pencil down and smiled at the phone.

"It will be. We'll make sure of it."

"Okay. Okay." He exhaled. "I'm going back to the studio. I'll send photos tonight."

"Send them whenever. I'll be here."

He hung up. I picked up my coffee and took a sip. Cold. I'd poured it an hour ago and forgotten about it, which was becoming a pattern.

"Soleil." Margaux appeared in the doorway of the back room, her laptop open on one arm, a pen between her teeth. She pulled it out. "Printing costs for the exhibition catalog. Three options." She turned the screen toward me. "Option one is beautiful and will bankrupt us. Option two is reasonable and looks like a takeout menu. Option three is somewhere in the middle, but the paper stock feels like a napkin."

I crawled across the butcher paper to look at her screen. "What about the printer in Long Island City? The one who did the invitations for the first show?"

"Called them yesterday. They can do a short run at option-three pricing with option-one paper stock, but only if we commit by next week." She typed something with one hand. "Collector outreach — I've sent personal invitations to Eleanor Voss, the Whitfield group, and fourteen others from the first show's buyer list. Eight have confirmed. Eleanor's assistant said she's— Margaux lifted one hand from the keyboard and made air quotes— “very interested."

"Very interested is Eleanor's language for 'I'm coming, and I'm buying.'"

"That's what I thought." Margaux snapped the laptop shut. "The Hargrove grant covers programming through the spring. As long as that holds, we're good. Rafael's show is fully funded."

I picked up my phone and scrolled to Nolan's name. I snapped a photo of the butcher paper — the arrows, the crossed-out arrows, the Post-it notes, and my bare foot visible in the corner — and sent it.

Soleil