Chapter 24
Adam showed up at the gallery entrance balancing a roll of bright blue painter’s tape in one hand. When Lucy emerged from the lobby, he raised the tape as if it were a badge, half-smiling in mock seriousness.
Around them, the gallery’s white walls bore framed illustrations at regular intervals, each spot thoughtfully illuminated by overhead track lighting.
A pair of waiters methodically arranged wineglasses along a slim table draped in black, and Lucy’s editor was deep in debate with the lighting technician—each insisting the room felt either alluringly intimate or painfully underfunded.
“You brought tape,” Lucy pointed out, folding her arms across the bodice of her black dress.
She’d invited him three days earlier in a moment of confidence that had already soured into second-guessing.
She regretted inviting him, then regretted regretting it, all before she finished her morning coffee.
“I knew you’d forget it,” he answered, stepping forward to press the roll into her palm.
He didn’t attempt a kiss—just a quick slide-and-release gesture.
“I also packed scissors, binder clips, safety pins, and those Ibuprofen you pop when your feet start revolting after hours on your display ladder.”
She examined the tape in her hand, turning the spool between her fingers. “You assembled a Lucy emergency kit.”
“Pablo helped,” Adam admitted with a grin. “He’s convinced that preparedness is the defining difference between senior management and feral beasts.”
“You mean interns?”
“Yes, those.”
Lucy tucked the tape into the hidden pocket of her dress.
She watched him tuck his hands into the pockets of his navy suit trousers.
He’d forsworn a tie tonight—formal enough to look respectable among the editors and designers milling around but understated enough to suggest that the opening wasn’t a blowout personal gala.
He’d even left his expensive watch at home, as if honoring her offhand comment about how people noticed the gold band before they took in his face.
The gallery was hosting a winter exhibition of commercial illustration, but Lucy had a special space: one entire room dedicated to her work.
Her published covers hung side by side with the pencil sketches that had given birth to them.
Visitors could trace stray graphite smudges morphing into tangled forests, city blocks, and solitary figures standing beneath impossible skies.
On the final wall, the corrected Caribbean commission pieces stood beneath a simple plaque crediting Lucy Brooks as the sole artist—her name printed crisp and proud—while Northstar’s former licensing claim appeared as a single, smaller line below.
Adam paused in front of the largest frame. The image showed a compass at its center dissolving into a flock of birds in mid-flight—Lucy’s name printed below in letters so rigid no one could crop them out.
“They hung it too high,” he muttered, his gaze narrowing.
She had been watching him, waiting for either pride or self-reproach to color his face. Instead, Lucy heard those expert instincts he’d honed in corporate showrooms. “That’s what you notice first?”
“The center should sit at eye level,” he said, his voice quiet enough that only she could hear. “It’s four inches above the ideal.”
“Well—” she began, but he cut her off.
“You’re taller than the average viewer.”
He glanced toward a gallery assistant hoisting a ladder nearby. “Do you want me to fix it now, before anyone else arrives?”
Lucy let out the breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. “No,” she said. “I want you to stand here and feel the sting of imperfect picture placement. Don’t rearrange the room.”
Adam slid his hands fully into his pockets and gave a dry chuckle. “This evening may be more challenging than the invitation implied.”
Lucy bit back a grin as she moved away to check labels on the smaller pieces.
Already, industry folk filtered in. Authors with dog-eared portfolios, editors clinging to tablets, designers wearing black turtlenecks—some recognized one another only by email signatures.
Steven arrived with his mother Gloria, who wore a green velvet jacket and exuded the sort of boundless enthusiasm that suggested she’d been prepping her praise all week.
Steven’s ankle had healed enough that he walked without a limp, though a pale scar traced a line above his shoe whenever he perched on a stool.
He greeted Lucy with a kiss on the cheek, offered a firm handshake to Adam, then slipped a quick glance between them—the discreet calculation of a man preparing to ask questions at his leisure.
“You scrub up well,” Adam told him, stepping forward to tsae his hand.
Gloria pivoted toward Lucy and embraced her in a sweeping hug that spoke volumes.
Then she turned to Adam, tilting her head in appraisal.
She’d met him once before—back when she still believed Karina was Steven’s girlfriend—and her expression held every ounce of that old skepticism.
“You are the fiancé,” she announced as if reading the evening’s program out loud.
“Former,” Lucy corrected, keeping her tone neutral.
“Temporarily uncertain,” Adam supplied at the same time, flashing a half-apology smile.
Gloria put a perfect brow on parade. “I’ll fetch wine. Perhaps you’ll have agreed on a noun by the time I return.”
She drifted away, high-heeled and determined. Adam watched her go, then shifted his gaze back to Lucy. “Former sounded so final.”
“I’m actually optimistic about this,” he said.
“You weren’t invited to make pronouncements,” Lucy teased.
“I was answering a direct question,” he protested, though his tone softened.
“Steven,” Lucy interjected, spotting her friend across the room, “there are people in the next gallery already asking for introductions.”
Steven stepped toward the crowd. “Let Adam practice standing still and watching portraits.”
“He’ll fail,” Lucy said.
“I’ve been failing in ever more elaborate ways for months,” Adam replied. “I can manage one evening of looking useless.”
Light conversation hummed as Lucy drifted off to greet publishers, critics, and students who squealed over the original painting from her debut novel.
Two editors peppered her with questions about upcoming projects, and a young art student wondered how she chose palettes for stories that hadn’t been written yet.
All the while Adam stationed himself at the tail end of every small circle, ready with a spare glass of water when her throat grew gravelly and the painkillers when her left foot started to throb from her pumps.
He never offered explanations or made a show of these interventions, and that very discretion unsettled Lucy more than a parade of heroics would have. She noticed each quiet act and filed them away, cataloguing a growing frustration at being cared for so carefully.
Shortly before eight, a man from Northstar’s old executive suite crossed into her exhibition room.
She recognized him immediately—Theodore Teller, with his impeccably groomed eyebrows and wide stance that spoke of boardrooms and power lunches.
Lucy had privately dubbed him Astonishing Eyebrows during a cruise industry dinner, and now he approached with the same overgrown confidence, extending his hand first to Adam.
“Shay,” Theodore boomed. “I heard about the Bexley project. They landed Vantage Foods after you joined. You still have it.”
Adam gave Lucy a quick look before turning back to Theodore. “Theodore, this is Lucy Brooks—the artist behind tonight’s show.”
“We met on the cruise,” Theodore said, his tone dipping with recognition of where the memory truly lay. “Of course. Splendid exhibition.”
His eyes flicked to the Caribbean wall, hesitated on the plaque, then darted back to Adam with a mix of interest and calculation—like a man deciding if he could discuss business in front of an unintended rival.
“That campaign was the best work Northstar produced in years,” Theodore declared, lowering his voice. “Regardless of everything else.”
Adam’s reply was a measured exhale. “It was Lucy’s work. She deserves all the credit.”
“You designed the overall strategy,” Theodore countered.
“Some of it,” Adam allowed. He reached for Lucy’s hand, paused, then let the movement go. “But tonight isn’t about the pieces I contributed.”
Theodore nodded and pivoted to Lucy, firing a series of questions about a cover on the opposite wall.
He leaned in, demonstrating polite attention, but his gaze flickered back to Adam with every sentence—searching for that unspoken headline beneath the pleasantries.
When he finally asked if Adam might consider a consulting role, Adam deflected with a single line.
“Contact Bexley on Monday. I’m here with Lucy. She invited me.”
Theodore glanced at their hands, Lucy’s empty ring finger, and whatever Adam held in his expression. He accepted the signal and drifted toward the wine table.
“Theodore believes every object belongs to the most senior man standing next to it. I was that man for too long,” Adam said, his mouth pinching shut. “I liked him when I worked there.”
“You might like him again once you stop hating everyone who reminds you of your former self,” Lucy offered gently.
Adam’s lips twitched, betraying a laugh mixed with ruefulness. “That was unnecessarily accurate.”
Their moment fractured when a photographer requested Lucy for a shot in front of the main wall. She slipped away without a backward glance, and Adam’s gaze followed her retreating figure until she vanished into the press of admiring guests.
By nine o’clock, Lucy’s feet were throbbing, her cheeks ached from constant smiling, and the gallery’s bright white lights felt unforgiving.
Her editor climbed onto a low pedestal and tapped a glass, announcing that two of her covers had already sold as signed prints.
The room erupted in polite applause, light echoing off the frames.
Lucy stood beside the largest illustration, searching for something to do with her hands.
She found Adam at the back of the group, clapping without raising a phone.
Almost everyone else had used their screens to record the moment.
When the speech ended, Adam weaved through the clusters of people and positioned himself in line with those waiting to congratulate her, rather than stepping to the front as if staking a claim.
“You didn’t take a picture,” she said quietly when he reached her side.
“I took seventeen,” he whispered back.
“I saw your hands empty.”
“Steven has my phone.” He nodded toward a corner where Steven held two devices—one in each hand—looking as bored as a man forced to juggle apples when he’d come for oranges. “We agreed I wouldn’t watch your opening through a screen.”
“You and Steven made an agreement.”
“He’s occasionally useful.”
Lucy tracked Steven’s figure as he listened to Gloria describe Steven’s scar to a passerby as though it had been earned in military service. Steven raised the phone, caught Lucy’s eye, and Gloria went on talking about her son’s “island wound.”
“Did you ask Steven how I wanted tonight to be managed?” Lucy turned back to Adam.
“No. I asked him if photographing every single moment would annoy you,” Adam said, his tone tightening beneath the low edge of anger. “He said yes. But I already knew your answer.”
Adam stepped aside and spent the last half hour gathering empty glasses with the gallery assistant. When the final guest slipped out into the winter night, he stacked chairs against the walls and carried a box of leftover catalogs down the hall without being asked.
Lucy drifted to the corner where he’d parked himself, watching him work. “You’re using manual labor to stake your claim on the gallery,” she teased.
“No the gallery,” he replied, popping the lid off the catalog box for air circulation. “But I’m trying to make myself indespensible.”
She slid onto the floor beside him and surveyed the neat stacks. “You’re awful at stacking chairs.”
“Karina would’ve noticed,” he said, leaning the last chair upright.
“She would’ve labeled them before stacking.”
“Alphabetically?”
“Yes. By designer. Then by height.”
“They’re chairs, Lucy.”
“Nothing stopped her.”
Adam let out a laugh, a real, unrestrained sound that warmed the empty gallery. They both felt Karina’s name pass between them—fleeting, familiar, free of resentment.
Outside, snow had begun to fall in thin, drifting flakes that sparkled beneath the streetlamps. Steven offered Lucy a ride, but she shook her head. “Adam will walk me home.”
Steven glanced at Adam, shrugged, and caught up with Gloria without another word.
It took ten minutes for Lucy and Adam to reach her apartment—slow enough that the sharp air stung Lucy’s cheeks and made Adam’s bare hands redden. He carried her tote with her shoes tucked inside while she wore the ballet flats she’d hidden beneath the front desk during the opening.
As they passed the laundromat on the corner, Adam slipped the tote back into Lucy’s hand and paused under a battered streetlamp. The snow spun around them, each flake a whispered applause for a night that, for all its brilliance and missteps, had truly been hers.
He turned to her, his breath misting. “Thank you for inviting me. I know tonight mattered.”
Lucy smiled, both tired and triumphant. “You behaved impeccably for most of it.”
His expression softened, the tension draining out of his jaw. Snowflakes landed in his hair. “I was afraid you’d invite me, watch me all night, and find one mistake big enough to erase every other moment.”
“No,” she whispered, touching his cheek.
She gathered the tote at her feet, then stepped forward.
The kiss came without hesitation—warm and urgent, pressing him against the thin glass of the laundromat’s window, where spindly reflections of laundry machines blurred around them.
When they finally broke apart, his breath was ragged and his fingers clung to her coat.
“Come upstairs,” she offered, voice husky.
“For coffee?” he asked, hope and trepidation warring across his face.
“No,” she said. “I know what I’m asking.”
“Do you know what happens in the morning?” He searched her eyes.
She almost told him not to ruin it with doubts. Instead, she bent to retrieve the tote and pushed open the door.
“We’ll have breakfast,” she said, stepping inside. “You’ll make me pancakes. After that—I don’t know.”
Adam followed her across the threshold without another question.