Chapter 2 - Damien #2
I used to sit in the doorway and watch her paint. She didn't mind. Sometimes she'd talk to me about the birds, about color, about the way light behaved differently in the morning than the afternoon. These are my only good memories of her. The only ones not contaminated by what came after.
The night before she died, she came to my room. Late. I was half-asleep. She sat on the edge of my bed and stroked my hair, and I remember the smell of turpentine on her fingers.
"I'm sorry, darling," she whispered. "I'm so sorry."
I didn't understand. I was twelve. I said something—"It's all right, Mum" or "Go back to bed" or whatever a twelve-year-old says when his mother is crying in the dark. Something useless. Something I've replayed ten thousand times, searching for the version where I say the right thing and she stays.
In the morning, she was dead. Pills. The studio door was closed, and when I opened it, I found her last painting on the easel. A bird in a cage. The cage door open.
I close my eyes and press my palm flat against the cold glass of the window.
Two artists. My mother with her watercolor birds. Jess with her welded steel. One painted her prison. The other builds things that look like prisons but aren't—cages with gaps, ribs that don't quite close. Structures you could walk into or out of. The choice always visible.
The comparison isn't lost on me. Nothing is ever lost on me. That's the curse of a mind trained to find patterns—it finds them everywhere, whether they're meaningful or not.
I could stop this. Right now, this morning, I could delete the records, return the sculptures through Lena, and never go back to Brooklyn.
I could fold Jess Rowe into the vast archive of things I've observed and catalogd and moved past, and by next week she'd be a footnote. A glitch. An anomaly resolved.
I open my eyes and look at the mirror sculpture on my wall. My face stares back at me in fragments. Broken. Rearranged. Not quite recognisable.
I pull up the website for Nish's gallery—small, badly designed, listing upcoming shows.
The group show is in six weeks. No artist lineup posted yet, but Jess's friend has been pressuring her to participate.
I know this because I know everything about her daily life at this point, which is a sentence I should find alarming and instead find insufficient.
I begin drafting an email to Lena. Not about buying art this time.
About something else. An anonymous donation to the gallery—unrestricted funds, enough to ensure the show gets proper lighting, proper promotion, the kind of attention that a small East Village space doesn't normally attract.
Enough to ensure that if Jess Rowe agrees to show her work, the right people will be in the room.
Including me.
I'm aware of what I'm doing. Fully, precisely aware.
I'm inserting myself into the architecture of her life—not through force or confrontation, but through the quiet application of resources she doesn't have and won't trace back to me.
Adjusting variables. Improving conditions.
Shaping the terrain so that when we finally meet, it will feel natural.
Inevitable. As if the universe arranged it rather than the man with the checkbook.
I think again of Nathan Hale. Of the way he watched Eve Sinclair at that dinner—the hunger barely leashed behind his careful composure. I'd judged him for it. Silently, from across the table, I'd cataloged his obsession as a flaw and congratulated myself on my immunity to such weakness.
The irony is not lost on me.
But I'm not him. Nathan Hale was driven by guilt—a debt he owed a dead friend, twisted over years into something possessive and all-consuming. His obsession was reactive. Emotional. A wound that never healed, festering into fixation.
Mine is different. I don't owe Jess Rowe anything.
I have no history with her, no debt, no guilt.
What I have is a recognition—sudden, total, and inexplicable—that she is the thing I didn't know was missing from the machinery of my life.
The part that makes it run for a reason rather than just running.
That's not guilt. That's not sentiment. That's identification of a strategic necessity.
I tell myself this as I send the email. Tell myself this as I close the laptop and stand at the window and look out at the city I'm supposed to be conquering.
I tell myself that what I'm doing is different. More controlled. More deliberate. That choosing this path with open eyes is fundamentally distinct from stumbling down it blind. That self-awareness is a form of inoculation—if I know what I'm becoming, I can manage it. Contain it. Direct it.
The sculptures watch me from their positions in my apartment. The shattered mirror. The iron fist that might be a flower. Honest objects in a dishonest space, made by honest hands that don't know they're being watched.
I look at my own hands. Still steady. No tremor. The hands of a man who is in complete control of himself and his circumstances.
I'm not Nathan Hale.
I'm something worse. Because Nathan fell into his obsession the way a man falls off a cliff—without choosing, without planning, carried by forces he couldn't name or resist. He was a victim of his own compulsion, and there's a kind of innocence in that, however perverse.
I'm choosing this. Deliberately. With full knowledge of what it is and where it leads. Every step I take toward Jess Rowe is a step I've calculated, evaluated, and elected to take.
That doesn't make it better. I know that.
I'm choosing it anyway.