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Inside, it smells faintly of plaster, varnish, and fresh paint.

Several large canvases lean against walls waiting to be hung. Assistants move quietly through the space, measuring and adjusting lights. The ceilings are high, the floors pale, and the whole room feels suspended in that strange in-between state before a show opens—half work, half possibility.

Gabriel walks me slowly through the pieces that are already in place.

Bold abstract work in one room. Figurative oil portraits in another. A triptych of coastline studies that makes my chest ache because the blues are almost the exact shade of the water outside.

"They open in a few days," he says. "Small show. New artists, one established name to keep collectors feeling superior."

I smile despite myself.

Then he turns and looks at me in full.

"You should think about painting for a showing."

I go very still.

The words ring in me harder than they should.

Because this is the thing I've been circling without daring to touch. The thought under every brushstroke since yesterday. The possibility under the possibility.

He sees it immediately.

"I am not asking for an answer today," he says. "I am asking you to think seriously."

My eyes drop to the canvas tucked against my side.

To the man in the suit.

To the life I once thought I might have. Galleries. Paintings. Openings. A name printed on a card beside my work instead of buried in old portfolios in a storage unit I couldn't bear to revisit.

"I don't know if I can," I say quietly.

"Yes, you do," Gabriel says. "What you don't know is whether you'll allow yourself to."

That one takes the air right out of me.

Because again, annoyingly, he's right.

The want is there.

It's been there.

It's in my fingers. In the ache in my wrist. In the way I keep looking around this gallery with the terrible, hungry feeling of recognition.

But the guilt is there too.

My mother died coming home from my first gallery opening. My father's mind shattered in the same accident. The last time my art mattered publicly, it felt like it cost me everything.

How do you go back to something after that and not feel like you're tempting fate?

"I can feel it," I admit, voice low. "The need to paint. To keep going. To make more. To..." I laugh once under my breath, shaky around the edges. "To show them, maybe. But the guilt still sits there every time I think about it. Like if I let myself want this again, I'm betraying everything that happened."

Gabriel's expression softens, losing some of its teasing ease.

"You are not responsible for surviving," he says quietly. "And you are not dishonoring grief by making something beautiful with the life you still have."

That lands deep.