1. Soleil #2
Camille materialized at his elbow within seconds. Bianca drifted over. They orbited him — the heir, the golden boy, the name they wanted proximity to. Rhys smiled through it. He was exceptional at smiling through things.
The moment they released him, I watched him cross the room in a straight line to the bar.
He ordered a dark spirit and finished it in two swallows.
His hand came up to signal for another. His shoulders were pulled tight under his blazer, the fabric bunching between his shoulder blades as he leaned forward on the bar.
I looked away.
Camille found me again near the back wall.
She tucked a strand of that perfect hair behind her ear and dropped her voice like she was sharing classified intelligence.
"I ran into your father's lovely assistant last week.
Catherine mentioned Hugh is planning a special gathering for your birthday next month. "
"He always does something." I smiled. "He can't help himself."
"Such a devoted father." She tilted her head. "You're so lucky, Soleil."
I was. The luck of it sat so deep inside my bones I couldn't tell where it ended.
I was about to excuse myself when Margaux gripped my elbow from behind and pulled me backward, which nearly made me stumble.
"What are you — "
"Shut up." Margaux's fingers dug into my arm. Her eyes were locked on the gallery entrance. Her mouth was hanging open. "Look."
I turned.
A woman stood just inside the door. Silver hair — whiter in person than in the photographs I'd studied online, cut bluntly at her jaw.
Black linen dress. No jewelry except a single ring on her right hand.
She was small, barely 5 ft. 3 in, but she held herself like someone who'd been in rooms full of important people.
Eleanor Voss.
"Oh my god," I breathed.
"She's here," Margaux whispered. "She's in your gallery. Eleanor Voss is standing in your gallery right now. Go talk to her."
"I can't just walk up to her."
"Why not? It's your gallery."
"Because she's Eleanor Voss. She doesn't get approached. She approaches you. Everyone knows that."
"Well, she's approaching your wine table, so maybe start there."
I watched Eleanor move through the room. She didn't browse. She walked slowly, pausing at each painting for a few seconds, her head tilted, her lips pressed together. She said nothing to anyone. People stepped out of her path without being asked.
She stopped in front of the grandmother's kitchen. My heart was beating in my throat. She stood there for a full minute. Then another. Then she moved on.
Margaux poked me between the shoulder blades. "Go."
I smoothed the front of my dress and crossed the gallery, weaving past a cluster of guests, and stopped a few feet from where Eleanor was studying one of Rafael's smaller pieces — a window frame with a cracked pane, a bird sitting on the ledge, the S?o Paulo skyline blurred behind the glass.
"Ms. Voss." My voice came out steadier than I felt. "Thank you for coming. I'm Soleil Lattimore. This is my gallery."
She didn't look at me right away. She finished with the bird, the window, and whatever private assessment she was conducting, then turned. Her eyes were pale gray, sharp, and they moved over my face as if someone were reading the first page of a book, deciding whether to continue.
"You have a good eye," she said. "Someone told me about this space. I'm glad I came."
I was smiling so hard my face hurt. "That means a great deal. Really."
She nodded once and turned back to the paintings. I stood there for a second, floating, then walked back to Margaux.
Margaux was already on her phone. "She wants to discuss pricing," she whispered, her eyes enormous. "On three pieces. Three, Soleil." Her hand was trembling around the phone. "I need to sit down. I think I'm going to pass out."
"Don't pass out. We need you conscious for the negotiation."
"Right. Right. Conscious. Professional. I can do this." She fanned herself with a cocktail napkin and walked toward Eleanor, trying very hard not to scream.
I didn't notice the hours slipping away. The room thinned in waves — first the people who came to be seen, then the people who came for the wine, and finally the people who came for the art, lingering longest, speaking quietly, leaving with Rafael's card in their pockets.
Four paintings sold. One of the streetscapes went to the young couple I'd been speaking with earlier.
Rafael stood beside me while they signed.
When I looked at him, his eyes were glassy, and his lips were pressed tight together.
I put my hand on his shoulder and left it there until he could breathe again.
Rhys kissed my cheek on his way out. "Proud of you, Sol." His eyes were glassy too, but for different reasons. The collar of his shirt was looser than when he arrived. He'd had four drinks that I'd counted, probably more that I hadn't. I smiled and squeezed his arm and didn't say anything about it.
I let him go.
The gallery was nearly empty now. My heels sat abandoned behind the front desk.
Margaux was in the back room, doing the final numbers.
Rafael had left twenty minutes ago, hugging me so tightly I felt his ribs through his shirt, whispering "thank you" against my hair until I told him to go home and sleep.
I stood alone in front of the grandmother's kitchen. The flour was in the air. The hands were deep in dough. The light fell golden through the window. The kitchen that stopped me in Bushwick because it looked like the thing I'd lost.
My mother's kitchen had rosemary on every surface.
Pots on the windowsill, bundles drying from the rack above the stove, sprigs tucked into the napkin holder just because she liked the way they looked there.
She cooked with her bare hands — flour on her palms, oil on her wrists, her fingers pressing dough against the marble counter while I sat on the wooden stool beside her and asked questions she never got tired of answering.
What are you making, Mama?
Something for my Soleil.
Always that answer. As if everything she made in that kitchen was mine. As if the bread and the herbs and the slow simmering pots were love notes she wrote in a language only I could taste.
I was twelve when she died. A Tuesday afternoon.
A car accident on a road she'd driven a thousand times.
I was at school when the principal pulled me out of class and walked me to the office without saying why.
My father was there. He never picked me up — that was always the driver or my mother in the silver car with the windows down and the radio too loud.
Daddy didn't say anything on the ride home.
He held my hand across the console. His grip was so tight my fingers went white, then numb.
I knew before he said a word because his hand was shaking, and my father's hands didn't shake.
They didn't shake when he closed deals that made the news, and they didn't shake when he gave speeches to rooms full of hundreds.
But they shook that day, in the car, holding my hand, and the shaking told me everything his mouth couldn't.
He braided my hair that night. It was crooked and loose. I wore them to school the next day anyway because his hands had made them, and his hands were all I had left.
He showed up to every school play after that.
He built me a darkroom because I mentioned photography once over breakfast. By the time I came home from school, the basement was already being measured.
He pulled Rhys and me closer and closer until his arms were the only walls we knew, and the warmth inside them was so complete that I never thought to ask what he was keeping out.
I touched the frame of Rafael's painting. The grandmother's hands were covered in flour. The light fell through the window.
I pressed my thumb to the rosemary pot on the windowsill behind me. The oil was still there, faint now, almost gone.
The gallery was emptying around me, and I let it.
I stood barefoot on the concrete floor while the last guests trickled toward the door.
Margaux's voice drifted from the back room, on the phone with someone about tomorrow's schedule.
The overhead lights were warm, and the wine glasses were half-empty on the tables, and the night was winding down softly.
I was turning back toward the couple by the streetscape — they had one more question about the framing — when my voice just stopped. Mid-sentence. The words were there, formed and ready, and they died on my tongue.
I was looking at the far wall.
A man stood in front of Rafael's largest painting.
Dark skin, close-cropped hair tight to his skull.
A black fitted suit, no pocket square, no watch, no tie, no accessories of any kind.
His hands hung at his sides. His arms were still.
His jaw was set, locked, the muscles visible even from across the room.
He wasn't browsing. He wasn't holding a drink, a program, or a phone. He wasn't moving through space. He was planted in front of that canvas, with his feet apart, his weight settled, and his entire body aimed at the painting. As if it had called his name and he was deciding whether to answer.
Everyone else was in motion. He was the only still thing in the room. The stillness was so complete it pulled at the space around him, bending the light and the noise into his gravity, letting none of it land.
My mouth was still open. The couple was waiting. I couldn't remember what I'd been saying. I couldn't remember the question they'd asked. I was staring at a man I'd never seen before.
I set down my glass.
I started walking toward him before I realized my feet were moving.