Chapter Seventeen
ARIA
By the time I reach the promenade, the morning has already turned warm enough to kiss the tops of my shoulders.
Seattle never does this.
Seattle is beautiful in a moodier way. Steel, rain, evergreen edges, and gray water that looks gorgeous and haunting at the same time.
This place glitters. This place preens. This place has never once apologized for being gorgeous, and I think maybe that's why it makes my chest ache the way it does.
Because my mother wouldn't have apologized either.
I stop at the same café as yesterday, order a still-warm pastry in French, and carry it down to my spot on the promenade with the ridiculous, impossible thought that I might already have a spot on the promenade.
It's a low stone wall with a view of the water and just enough foot traffic to feel alive without making me feel watched.
Yesterday I sat here for hours and painted for the first time in three years.
The coastline. The boats. The safe, pretty things that let me ease back into it without having to feel too much.
This morning, when I left, Everett was already in the office.
The glass French doors had been shut.
I could see him from the kitchen like always now—one hand braced on the desk, his coffee beside the laptop, his expression set in that cool, focused way of his that says he's already halfway across the world in his head, solving problems nobody else is qualified to touch.
Visible, but unreachable. Right there and nowhere I could actually get to.
When I came down in my dress and grabbed my satchel, he looked at me like I'd startled him just by existing so brightly that early in the morning.
Then he offered me coffee.
Not in a grand, romantic gesture sort of way. Not with flowers or slow smiles or any of the other things my younger self once thought love was supposed to look like. He just reached for a to-go cup and asked how I take it.
Four sugars. More cream than he'd ever willingly put in anything.
He made it exactly right.
Now I sit on the warm stone, set the cup beside me, and pull out my canvas and brushes with a little more confidence than I had yesterday.
Not much more.
Just enough to be dangerous.
The sea stretches out in front of me in impossible shades of blue. White boats cut through it in the distance, leaving clean bright wakes behind them. A gull cries overhead. Somewhere farther down the promenade, someone laughs in French, quick and musical.
I dip my brush into paint.
Then pause.
I don't know what I'm painting.
Yesterday it was the water. The light. The safe things. Today my hands want something else, and I'm not sure I trust them with the freedom.
I touch brush to canvas anyway and let instinct lead.
Color first.
Then shape.
Then light.
But not the sea this time.
Something darker. A vertical line. Then another. The suggestion of glass. A figure building itself out of memory before I can stop it.
I don’t realize how much time has passed until the sun has shifted enough to change the shadows on the stone beside me and my coffee has gone lukewarm.
My hand aches in the most satisfying way.
There's a smear of cobalt on my thumb, another streak of white across the side of my wrist, and I don't think I've felt this peaceful in years.
"Interesting choice of subject."
I jerk so hard the brush nearly slips from my fingers.
I look up.
Gabriel stands there—the gallery owner from yesterday, the man with the card I tucked into my satchel and thought about for an hour after he walked away.
Another linen shirt today, sleeves rolled, sunglasses hanging from the placket.
He's holding two takeaway cups and a paper-wrapped baguette like he just stepped out of some aggressively European ad campaign designed to make people fall in love with Italy and carbohydrates.
He smiles when I blink at him.
"You came back," he says, like he knew I would.
"You found me," I say, like I'm not slightly unnerved by the fact that he did.
"You are not difficult to find." He crouches down beside me and offers one of the coffees and the baguette. "A woman painting alone on the promenade tends to stand out."
I take them automatically. "You didn't have to do this."
"I know," he says. "That is why it is charming."
I laugh under my breath and set the coffee beside me.
Then I look back at the canvas, and go still.
A faceless man in a dark suit stands at a penthouse window with a phone pressed to his ear. Broad shoulders. Rigid posture.
A sense of stillness so tense it feels like the whole figure is holding itself together by force.
I stare at it.
At him.
At the exact outline of Everett Kauffman looking back at me from the canvas without a face and without permission.
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."
I glance over at him, surprised by the gentleness in the question.
"My mother. She was an aspiring painter," I say, and even now the phrase feels too small for who she was. "Or maybe not aspiring. She was one. She just didn't get the kind of time people like to imagine artists get. She made things anyway."
Gabriel nods like he understands exactly the difference between aspiring and simply being.
"She grew up not far from here," I continue. "Closer to Villefranche-sur-Mer. My father met her while he was traveling. He likes to tell the story like it's one long postcard. She was painting outside. He was carrying too many peaches. One rolled under her easel."
Gabriel smiles.
"She told him his flirting needed work," I say, smiling a little myself now because some stories soften instead of hurt when you tell them often enough. "Apparently his French was tragic. He kept coming back anyway. They fell in love here."
"And you came hoping the magic might be hereditary," Gabriel says.
The words settle in me quietly.
I look back out at the sea. "Something like that."
The truth is bigger and messier than that.
I came because my father used to tell me to fall in love in France, and for years I thought he meant with a person. Now I'm starting to think maybe he also meant with myself. With beauty. With wanting things. With life again.
"I think," I say slowly, "I hoped this place would crack something open."
Gabriel doesn't answer right away.
Then: "It already has."
My throat tightens.
I glance down at the canvas. At the paint still wet under the sun. At the man without a face who somehow still looks like Everett. At the evidence of everything I am clearly not admitting anywhere except here.
"Yes," I say softly. "Maybe it has."
Gabriel brushes a crumb from his hand and stands. "Come with me."
I blink up at him. "Where?"
"To the gallery."
My first instinct is to say no.
Too fast. Too vulnerable. Too much.
But my paint-stained fingers tighten around the edge of the canvas instead.
"Now?"
"Yes, now." He tips his head toward the satchel. "Bring him with you."
I laugh. "I'm not sure Everett would appreciate being referred to as portable art."
"He should be honored."
I should say no.
Instead, I pack up the canvas and follow Gabriel through the winding side streets of Cannes, carrying my painting and my coffee and all the nervous hope I haven't let myself name yet.
The gallery is tucked off a narrower lane I never would have found on my own, behind a whitewashed facade with tall windows and discreet gold lettering that reads Galerie Amaury.
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.