Chapter 1 #2
I couldn't do this. I couldn't do this. I was going to die in my studio surrounded by art I was too broken to appreciate, and no one would find me for days because no one ever came here, because I'd built my life around needing no one, and this was what I got for it—
Then Ghost was there.
Seventy pounds of grey velvet pressing against my legs, his long whippet nose nudging my hand with gentle insistence.
He didn't bark—he never barked—just leaned into me with his whole trembling body.
He was anxious himself, I could feel it in the fine vibration running through his muscles, but he was determined to anchor me anyway.
Good boy. Good boy. Good boy.
I couldn't say the words out loud, but I thought them as I slid down to the paint-splattered concrete floor.
My legs stopped working, or maybe I just stopped asking them to hold me up.
Ghost folded himself into my lap despite being far too large for it, all long legs and pointed ears and that ridiculous elegant face that had made me fall in love with him at the rescue shelter three years ago.
I buried my face in his neck.
He smelled like oats—I used an oat shampoo because regular dog shampoo was too perfumed. He smelled like home.
Two minutes.
My breathing slowed. The band around my chest loosened, one degree at a time.
Four minutes.
The sounds were still there—the city never stopped being loud—but they'd receded to background. My brain remembered how to filter again. The car alarm had stopped, or I'd stopped hearing it. The construction continued, but it was rhythm now instead of assault.
Ghost's heart beat steady against my palm. I counted the beats instead of counting my breaths. Easier. More real.
One, two, three, four.
My hands stopped trembling.
I sat on my studio floor with my dog in my lap, and I let myself exist without trying to be anything.
Not the expert authenticator. Not the functional adult who paid bills on time and kept her home clean.
Not the woman who had everything together because she'd learned to mask so well that most people never saw the scaffolding underneath.
Just Auralia. Just this. Just Ghost's warmth and the fading afternoon light and the slow return of equilibrium.
Eventually, I wiped my face. I hadn't realized I'd been crying, but my cheeks were wet and Ghost's fur was damp where I'd pressed against him. He licked my hand once, twice, then settled his chin on my knee with a sigh that seemed to say There. Better now.
"Thank you," I whispered.
He huffed in response. We understood each other, he and I. Both of us too sensitive for this world, both of us determined to survive it anyway.
The painting waited on my examination table, patient as ever. The peasant woman was no longer accusatory. She was just a woman in a wheat field, looking at something I couldn't see.
Tomorrow.
I'd finish the analysis tomorrow.
Right now, I needed to take care of myself.
B y seven o'clock, I'd pulled myself back together. That's the thing about meltdowns—they pass. The world keeps turning, the dog still needs to be walked, and eventually you have to get up off the floor and pretend you're a functioning human being.
Ghost had been walked along the waterfront, his elegant legs stretching into that effortless greyhound lope that always made me smile despite myself.
He was built for running, all aerodynamic curves and impossible grace, and watching him move was like watching a living sculpture in motion.
We'd gone the long way, past the carousel and under the bridge, letting the evening breeze off the East River wash away the last of the afternoon's sensory residue.
I'd eaten. Reheated soup from Sunday's batch cooking—lentil with cumin and roasted tomatoes, a recipe I'd perfected over years of necessity.
I could only handle food preparation when I scheduled it in advance, when I had the energy and the mental capacity to follow the steps without deviation.
Sunday afternoons were for cooking. Six meals, portioned into containers, labelled with contents and date.
Any therapist would probably call it rigid. I called it survival.
The Repin documentation sat in a neat folder on my desk, ready for me to compile my authentication report tomorrow. The mystery of the too-perfect provenance could wait. The question of what Victor Harmon was really hiding could wait.
Some things couldn't.
I stood in the corner of my studio that I never showed anyone.
Six canvases leaned against the wall, faces turned inward like shy children avoiding eye contact with strangers.
My own work. The secret I kept from clients, from the few acquaintances I'd accumulated over the years, from everyone except Ghost and the anonymous strangers on the internet who would never connect this work to my professional reputation.
Eleven days. I hadn't painted in eleven days, and the itch beneath my skin was becoming unbearable.
That's how it felt—an itch, a pressure, a restless energy that accumulated in my hands until I couldn't hold a coffee cup without wanting to do something with it. Create something. Transform something. Take the chaos inside my head and give it form and colour and meaning.
I reached out and turned one canvas around.
Ghost stared back at me.
But not Ghost as he actually was—not a photograph rendered in paint, not a portrait in the traditional sense.
This was Ghost mid-run on the beach at Coney Island last autumn, captured in that moment when all four feet left the ground and he became briefly weightless.
I'd abstracted him, dissolved his form into streaks of grey and silver and impossible motion.
He was there and not there. Real and dream.
A dog and also pure speed, pure joy, pure aliveness.
I'd worked on it for three weeks. Stayed up until two in the morning more than once, mixing colours I didn't have names for, layering paint until the texture became something you wanted to touch.
When I'd finally stopped—not finished, I never thought of my work as finished, just stopped—I'd stood back and felt something I almost never felt.
Pride.
This was good. This was actually good. I could see the technical skill, yes, but I could also see something else. Something that came from inside me and didn't exist anywhere else in the world. Something that was mine.
And yet.
I couldn't imagine showing it to another living soul.
What if they didn't see what I saw? What if they looked at my abstracted dog and saw only confusion, only mess, only evidence that I didn't understand the fundamentals of representation? What if they patronized me with polite compliments while their eyes said something else entirely?
Or worse. What if they saw through it? What if they looked at my painting and saw me—the real me, the anxious complicated exhausting me—and confirmed what I already suspected?
That I was a competent technician, nothing more.
That I could analyze other people's genius, could authenticate other people's masterpieces, but couldn't create anything worthy of that scrutiny myself.
That my paintings were like my social interactions: technically correct but missing some essential quality that made them real.
I'd been told I was too much, my entire life.
Too intense. Too sensitive. Too rigid. Too weird.
The art world was full of people like that, or so I'd heard, but I'd never quite managed to find my tribe.
I could talk about Repin's brushwork for hours.
I couldn't manage small talk at gallery openings.
The painting didn't care about any of that. Ghost ran through his eternal autumn afternoon, frozen in silver joy, and he didn't need anyone else to validate his existence.
I turned the canvas back to the wall.
"Sorry," I whispered to him. To myself. To whatever part of me still hoped for something different.
Ghost—the real Ghost—lifted his head from his dog bed and gave me a long, considering look. He was too smart, this dog. He always knew when I was being a coward.
"I know," I told him. "I know."
He sighed and put his head back down.
I went to find my laptop.
The studio had gone fully dark while I wasn't paying attention, and I didn't bother turning on the overhead lights.
The glow from the windows was enough—city light, never quite dark, the amber of Brooklyn at night.
I liked it better than the harsh fluorescents anyway.
Softer. Easier on eyes that had already processed too much today.
My laptop was where I always left it, on the small table beside my armchair. I carried it back to the chair like a talisman, like the key to a door that only existed online. Ghost watched me settle in with the expression of a dog who knew exactly what came next.
My secret life. My real life, in some ways.
The only place where I could be myself.
The Discord server was called "The Cozy Corner," and it had exactly forty-three members.
I knew the number because I'd watched it change over the past eighteen months—people joining after surviving the rigorous vetting process, people leaving when their lives moved in different directions, one person dying (cancer, too young, we'd grieved together across time zones).
I'd found it during a particularly bad week, two winters ago.
My authentication of a supposedly Renaissance masterpiece had uncovered an elaborate forgery ring, and the resulting publicity had been overwhelming.
Reporters calling. Gallery owners demanding explanations.
My face in newspapers and trade magazines when all I wanted was to disappear.
Ghost had helped me through the days. The server helped me through the nights.