Chapter 2

The Man at the Door

She was mixing colors when she heard the bell.

It was the following morning, not quite nine, and she had come in early the way she sometimes did when a painting was calling to her in that specific, slightly urgent way that she had learned over the years to answer. She had the canvas stretched and primed and she was at the worktable building her palette, adding raw sienna to a pool of titanium white and watching it fold in like something being born, when the small brass bell above the front door announced that someone had come in.

'We're not open yet,' she called, without looking up. She did not look up because the color was doing something interesting and she needed to catch it before it went somewhere she didn't want it to go. 'Sign on the door says nine. Come back in fifteen minutes.'

No one spoke.

She added a touch of burnt umber to the edge of the pool and pulled a palette knife through it and watched the colors move together. Still nothing from behind her. Not a footstep, not the sound of the door opening again. Just silence.

She looked up.

He was standing in the middle of her studio.

Matteo Rossi. Thirty-one years old, dressed in a dark suit with no tie, his jacket open and his collar undone in the way that said he had either forgotten the last detail or decided it didn't matter. He was taller than she remembered, or maybe she had just forgotten how much space he took up simply by standing somewhere. His hair was shorter than it had been five years ago. His face was older, not aged, not weathered, just settled, the way faces settled when their owners had stopped trying to be anything other than what they were. He had the same green eyes, she had forgotten, somehow, that she remembered them that precisely.

He was looking at her the way he used to look at paintings, like she was the only thing in the room. Like the room itself had arranged itself around her as the central fact and everything else was peripheral.

She put down the palette knife, she was aware that she had a smear of raw sienna on the back of her left hand and that her hair was up in the messy way it went when she had been working and hadn't thought about it. She was aware that she had not looked at him in five years and that her body was reacting to the sight of him the way bodies reacted to things they had been trained to recognize, a kind of heightened attention that she did not want and could not immediately switch off.

She said, 'How did you get my address?'

'It wasn't difficult to find,' he said. His voice was the same. Lower, maybe, or maybe she was just remembering it wrong.

'That's not an answer.'

'I know.'

She looked at him for a long moment, he did not look away. He never had been the kind of person who looked away from things that were hard to look at, which was one of the things she had loved about him and also, she was beginning to remember, one of the things that had made him infuriating.

'I need you to leave,' she said.

'I need five minutes.'

'I don't have five minutes for you.'

Something moved across his face, she did not let herself name it. He did not argue, he looked around the studio instead, taking it in slowly, the way he used to look at things in the gallery where they had met, with a kind of unhurried attention that she had found disarming then and found disarming now.

He looked at the north windows, he looked at the paintings on the east wall, at her work, and she saw him stop at the largest canvas and stay there for a moment. He looked at the small details of the space, the plan chest, the kettle, the stool she had put there for bags that no one used for bags. He looked at all of it the way people looked at things they were trying to understand, not the surface but the fact of it, what it meant that it existed.

'It's beautiful,' he said.

She said, 'I know. I built it.'

He turned back to her, for a moment neither of them spoke. The studio was very quiet, outside a car passed and the sound of it was distant and ordinary and it made the silence inside feel more complete.

He reached into the inside pocket of his jacket and took out a card and set it on the counter between them. Heavy stock. His name. A phone number. Rossi Luxe Holdings.

'I'll come back tomorrow,' he said.

'Don't,' she said.

He looked at her once more, that same direct unhurried attention, and then he walked to the door and went through it and was gone. The bell above the door rang once, small and bright, like a punctuation mark.

Valentina stood at her worktable and did not move for a full minute.

Then she picked up the card and looked at it, the cardstock was the color of cream. The printing was engraved, not printed. The name looked the same as it always had, like something with weight behind it. She turned the card over, blank on the back. She held it by its edges and considered the trash can under the counter, which was where it should go, obviously, which was the only reasonable destination for it.

She put it in the drawer instead.

She stood there for another moment looking at the closed drawer. Then she went back to her palette and her canvas and her colors, which were still doing interesting things despite everything, and she made herself work.

She worked until seven in the evening, when Diego came in at two she was short with him in the way she was short with people when something was taking up too much of her mental space and she didn't want to explain what it was. He gave her the look but he didn't push, which was why she loved him.

She could not sleep.

She lay in her apartment with the ceiling fan turning slowly above her and the distant sound of the neighborhood outside her window, music from somewhere down the block, a burst of laughter from the street, and she stared at the ceiling and thought about nothing and thought about everything and did not sleep.

At two in the morning she got up, she made coffee she didn't need and took it to the small table she used as a studio in the corner of her living room where she kept a few canvases and the paints she used when she wasn't at Sol & Canvas. She stretched a piece of linen over a board she had propped against the wall. She opened a tube of phthalo blue and a tube of titanium white and a tube of yellow ochre and she started working.

She worked for three hours without thinking about what she was making, which was the only way she worked when something was too close to look at directly. She moved paint around the board and let it find its own shapes and followed where it wanted to go rather than where she wanted to put it. This was the method she had developed in the four months after he left, when she had made the best work of her life and could not explain afterward how she had done it. The body knew what the mind was managing. The body worked it out on its own if you let it.

At five in the morning she stepped back and looked at what she had made.

It was a cityscape. Miami from above, or from far away, or from memory, the way it looked from a high place at night, the lights scattered and brilliant against the dark. A rooftop view, she had not painted it consciously. She had not chosen the colors that suggested heat and closeness and the particular feeling of standing somewhere high with the city below you and someone beside you.

She knew which rooftop, she had known it for twenty minutes without letting herself know it.

She left the painting on the board and went and made more coffee and stood in her kitchen and thought about the card in the drawer at Sol & Canvas. She thought about the way he had looked at her studio, like he was trying to understand what it cost her to have built it. She thought about his face in her doorway, the way the years had settled into it. She thought about the look that had moved across it when she told him she didn't have five minutes for him.

She thought, he said he'd come back tomorrow.

She thought, don't let him.

She got ready for work in the dark and arrived at Sol & Canvas at twenty past five and stood in the quiet of her studio and told herself she was fine.