The Unveiling
The gallery smells of white wine and fresh paint, that particular mixture of celebration and anxiety Elena has never quite learned to stomach. She pushes through the glass door fifteen minutes late, shaking rain from her sleeves, already composing the apology she'll offer Priya for missing the opening toast. The room is warm with bodies, murmurs, the clink of glasses. Someone's laugh rings too loud near the cheese table. Elena scans the crowd for a familiar face and finds none, and for a moment she lets herself relax into anonymity, grateful to be unnoticed among strangers admiring other people's work.
Then she sees it.
Her breath catches somewhere behind her sternum, lodges there like a stone. Across the room, beneath a track light angled with deliberate care, hangs *Undone*. Her painting. The one she buried in the back of her closet eight months ago, behind winter coats and a box of David's—no, not David, that's not right, behind a box of *Daniel's* old sweaters she never returned. The one she painted at three in the morning with her hands shaking so badly the brush skipped and dragged across the canvas in a language she didn't fully understand until she stepped back and saw a…
