I didn't see it coming.
That's the part that stays with me afterward. Not the pain—the surprise. Three years of marriage and I had never once seen Arian Perkins raise his hand. I'd catalogued every version of his cruelty: the silence at dinner, the empty chair beside me at my parents' gallery openings, the way he looked through me like I was a smudge on glass. But not this.
His palm connected with my cheek so hard the room tilted. I stumbled backward, hit the edge of the coffee table, and went down. The portfolio went with me—my father's sketches fanning out across the marble floor like scattered feathers. His handwriting face-up. His pencil annotations catching the light.
I sat there for a moment, my palm pressed flat against the cold tile, and I looked at those sketches. My father's careful notes in the margins. *Curve here—let light breathe through.* His whole mind, right there on the floor, stepped over by the man who owned the house.
Because that's what Arian did. He stepped over them. He didn't look down. He crossed the room and wrapped an arm around Catalina's shaking shoulders, and she turned her face into his chest like she'd been doing it her whole life.
Maybe she had.
'Leave,' he said. Still not looking at me. 'And don't come back.'
His voice was flat. Calm. The voice of a man closing a meeting.
Catalina's crying had already softened into quiet, elegant sniffles. She peeked at me over his shoulder—just once, just for a second—and in that second her eyes were completely dry.
I gathered my father's sketches off the floor. I took my time. I smoothed each page, stacked them in order, slid them back into the portfolio. My hands were steady. I don't know how. Some part of me had already gone somewhere very quiet and cold, and from that place, the shaking didn't reach.
I walked out without a word.
---
She called three days later.
The number was unfamiliar, but the voice was Arian's assistant—polite, efficient, brief. Ms. Torres had arranged for some of Mr. Wells' personal effects to be collected from a secondary property in New Jersey. Would I be available Thursday?
I stood at my kitchen window and looked out at the gray Brooklyn rooftops and thought about my father's tools. His notebooks. The small things he kept in his pockets—the folded sketches, the worn tape measure he'd carried since before I was born. Things that weren't the sculpture. Things that were just him.
I said yes.
I knew, somewhere beneath the wanting, that it was probably a mistake. But the wanting was louder. It always was, when it came to anything that had been his.
---
The New Jersey property was forty minutes outside the city—a low, unremarkable building set back from a county road, surrounded by scrubby trees that had already dropped their leaves. November had stripped everything bare. The sky was the same pewter gray it had been the morning my parents died.
I noticed that. I noticed it and kept driving anyway.
There was a woman waiting at the door—not Catalina, not anyone I recognized. She smiled and led me inside without much conversation, down a hallway that smelled of industrial cleaner and something older underneath it, something damp.
'Ms. Torres will be just a moment,' she said, and then she wasn't there anymore.
I stood in a small room off the hallway. There was a table. Two chairs. A single overhead light. No boxes. No personal effects. No trace of anything that had belonged to my father.
The door clicked behind me.
I turned around. Catalina stood in the doorway, and she wasn't crying now. She wasn't performing anything. She looked at me the way she'd looked at my father's sketches on the floor of the estate—like she was appraising something she'd already decided to take.
'Sit down, Sloane,' she said.
I didn't sit. 'Where are my father's things?'
'There are no things.' She stepped into the room. Behind her, two men I'd never seen followed. 'There's just a document I need you to sign. A statement confirming that you have no claim to any work currently attributed to me.'
The chair in the corner wasn't a regular chair. I saw that now. The wrist straps. The small black box on the side table.
My chest went very still.
'Catalina—'
'You came here alone,' she said, almost gently. 'That was your choice. I gave you a way out at the estate. You could have left quietly.' She tilted her head. 'You didn't.'
I looked at the door. I looked at the two men. I looked at the chair.
And I understood, with a clarity that felt almost like calm, that no one was coming.
Not Arian. Not anyone.
I was completely, entirely alone—and the woman standing in front of me had already decided what happened next.
