The Weight of a Glance
The Voss Gallery smelled of white wine and money—a combination Ella had learned to recognize the way sailors recognize the smell of a coming storm. She stood near the back wall, half-hidden by a marble pillar, holding a glass of champagne she had no intention of drinking, watching a woman in a sequined blazer tilt her head at *Autumn Reverie No. 3* as though the tilting itself might unlock some hidden meaning.
There was no hidden meaning. That was the trouble.
The painting was competent. Ella could admit that much—the burnt-orange maples, the soft gold light bleeding through their branches, the little wooden bridge she'd added at Marguerite's suggestion because "collectors love a focal point, darling, something for the eye to rest on." It was pretty. It was safe. It was the kind of painting that matched a dining room, that didn't ask anything of the person looking at it, that certainly never kept her awake at three in the morning with her chest tight and her hands aching to hold a brush.
The real work—the paintings that did that to her—sat rolled in a closet in her apartment on Delancey Street, wrapped in old bedsheets like bodies nobody wanted to bury.
"You look like you're…
