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Yesterday I painted the coastline. The boats. The safe, pretty things.

Today my subconscious apparently decided safety was boring.

"Oh no."

Gabriel glances from the painting to me. "That bad?"

"I didn't mean to paint..." I trail off helplessly, then gesture at the canvas. "That."

The smile he gives me is infuriatingly patient. "Sometimes our art comes out subconsciously."

I look at him.

He lifts one shoulder in a small shrug. "Sometimes it's an emotion. Sometimes it's a feeling. The ones we don’t know how to say out loud end up on a canvas."

I turn back to the painting, my stomach doing a strange little drop.

The faceless figure stands there against a suggestion of glass and skyline, and even unfinished, there's no mistaking the loneliness in it.

The distance.

The sheer, impossible solitude of a man who is always in the middle of things and somehow still set apart from all of them.

Gabriel leans slightly closer, studying it.

"The lonely billionaire," he says.

Heat rushes into my cheeks.

"That sounds ridiculous."

"It sounds accurate."

I open my mouth to argue, then close it again because unfortunately, it does sound accurate.

I blow out a breath and set the brush down carefully across the edge of my palette. "This is humiliating."

"Not for me." He takes a sip of his coffee. "For me, it is interesting."

I look at him flatly. "You're enjoying this way too much."

"I'm enjoying that you're painting what matters instead of what is safe."

That lands harder than I expect.

Because he's right.

Yesterday I painted the water. The boats. The light on the stone. Something picturesque and easy and emotionally neutral enough to frame over a guest bed and forget.

Today, apparently, my subconscious skipped straight over the Riviera and painted my emotionally repressed husband.

Excellent.

I tear off a piece of the baguette and try not to think too hard about that.

Gabriel sits beside me for a while without pressing, eating his own lunch and letting the silence settle into something easy. I've always liked people who know how to do silence well. Who don't rush to fill every pocket of it with noise just because they're afraid of what might surface if they don't.

Finally, he says, "Tell me what's on your mind."