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“I wanted the surface to fight me,” I tell her. “The paintings are about moving through structures that don’t want to change. It needs a battle to bring the essence through.”

“And the gold?” she asks. “What does that symbolise to you?”

“Transformation.”

“This differs from your earlier work.” Her eyes hold mine in a vice. “The gold used to appear restrictive, but it’s changed.”

She’s good. She gets it.

But that’s her job, after all.

“In those pieces, it represented privilege,” I tell her. “Beauty with a structure attached. Something that could open doors while keeping me contained inside them.”

“I see. And here?”

“It marks the places where the surface broke. Finally.”

Her eyes narrow, but they aren’t cold.

“Is breaking the same as transformation?”

“I don’t think so, not really. Breaking can destroy something without creating anything better. Transformation is what you choose to build from the pieces. That’s how it feels to me.”

Camilla studies the black lines.

“They bend.”

“Yes.”

“Your earlier lines don’t.”

“No.”

“Why?”

There it is.

The question I knew would come.

I look at the triptych and see its beginnings beneath the layers. Jack’s red force. Bryce’s secretive purple. My yellow pushing through them both. Gold finding every fracture and refusing to cover it neatly.

“The black line has always represented reality to me,” I say. “The part that remains fixed, no matter what exists around it. Emotion, imagination, desire. None of those things changed the rules.”

“But these works did?”

“They made me question whether the rules were ever as fixed as I thought.”

My voice trembles.

I let it.

“I didn’t plan the bend,” I say. “I noticed it when I stepped back. I could have corrected it, but that would have been a lie.”

Camilla returns her attention to the work. She holds up a hand and Daniel opens his case, takes out a camera.

My pulse skips.

“The title?” she asks. “The Shape of Things Unbound. Why not simply Unbound? Unbound could be more of a statement in itself.”