CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

SELENES’s POV

The Meridian Art Fair happened once a year in the old gallery district, the kind of event that existed at the intersection of genuine culture and performative wealth. Artists whose work would sell for obscene amounts stood beside collectors who bought paintings the way other people bought furniture, for the statement rather than the feeling.

I hadn’t planned to attend but Clara had flagged it three days ago as a networking opportunity. Two foreign collectors I had been trying to schedule were both confirmed attendees, and informal setting made certain conversations easier than boardrooms allowed. I had agreed without much thought and moved on to the next item on the schedule.

Now, standing inside the main gallery hall with a glass of sparkling water in hand, I was beginning to wish I had sent representatives instead.

Though, the conversations were concluded within the first forty minutes; terms were discussed, follow-up meetings scheduled…the particular pleasantries of very wealthy people pretending they weren’t calculating each other’s net worth while discussing brushwork.

It was the gallery itself that was causing problems.

Specifically, the large oil painting hanging near the far end of the second hall.

I had turned a corner and stopped without meaning to. It was a coastal scene; dark water, a bridge in the background, storm clouds rendered in deep grey and violet above a churning surface that the artist had captured with uncomfortable accuracy. Rain suggested rather than depicted, the whole thing came alive with the specific violence of a storm that hadn’t finished yet.

I stood in front of it longer than was advisable.

The specific shade of dark used for the water image captured my attention.

“Striking, isn’t it.”

A woman appeared beside me, studying the same painting. She was older, grey-haired, clearly one of the collectors rather than the social crowd. She spoke with the authority of someone who had been looking at art for decades.

“The artist spent three years on coastal paintings after a personal loss,” she continued. “You can feel it. That particular quality of grief that hasn’t found its shape yet.”

“Yes, you can” I said gently.

She glanced at me briefly before moving on.

I stayed another moment, then turned away from the painting and walked back toward the main hall.

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The fair was spread across three connected gallery spaces, each flowing into the next through wide arched doorways. By early afternoon the crowd had grown much considerably; artists, collectors, journalists, society figures…the usual architecture of events like this.

I moved through it at a methodical pace, stopping occasionally when a painting on the wall warranted it, exchanging brief words with people who approached.

Clara had remained near the entrance managing messages and rescheduled calls. I had given myself an hour before leaving.

I was passing through the second gallery when I saw her.

Ava was standing near a series of small framed photographs on the far wall, her back partially to me, studying one of them with focused intensity. She wore a dark green coat, her curly hair loose around her jaw, one hand resting against her chin the way it always did when she was genuinely engaged with an object.

I stopped abruptly, I wanted to leave right at that moment. I wanted to run but I felt stuck to the ground.

The exit to the third gallery was just ten feet to my left. I could turn and move through the doorway, find Clara and arrange to depart. It would take only forty seconds and Ava would never know I had been in the same room.

I was already calculating the angle when Ava turned toward the next portrait along the wall, a slight shift of her body that brought her face into view. And there was something about the angle of it; there was tiredness around her eyes.

I should have moved but I didn’t. Instead I found myself drifting, almost without deciding to, toward the same wall. I stopped at a distance, just three portraits between us and a reasonable distance of the gallery floor, but the same wall.

I stopped in front of a black and white portrait of a coastline and looked at it without actually looking at it.

Ava moved to the next frame, closer to me now. Just two portraits between us.

I kept my eyes on the coastline image and regulated my rising breath deliberately.

You are Selene Arden, I told myself. You have always been Selene Arden. You do not know this woman. You have never met this woman. She is a stranger in a gallery and you are looking at a portrait.

Ava moved again. Just one portrait between us now. I could hear her breathing. That was the thing the surgeons never warn you about when they rebuilt your face, retrained your voice and restructured everything about how you moved through the world. They couldn’t rebuild what your body remembered.

The particular rhythm of someone else’s presence. The exact cadence of a familiar breathing pattern. Fifteen years of knowing someone wouldn’t disappear because a surgeon changed your nose.

Ava stopped at the portrait directly beside mine.

For approximately seven seconds we stood side by side looking at separate images on the same wall and said nothing.

Then Ava sighed, the specific sigh she made when the thing she was looking at had moved her.

“God, she was beautiful,” she said gently, almost like she was talking to herself.

I turned, the portrait Ava was looking at was that of a young woman; dark-haired, soft-eyed, laughing at something outside the frame with the unguarded openness of someone who didn’t know they were being photographed. The kind of image that captures a person at the exact moment they forgot to reflect on themselves.

I looked at the woman in the portrait and felt a chill race quickly through me.

The woman in the photograph looked nothing like me. Nothing like Selene Arden with her reconstructed jaw and higher cheekbones but the expression captured looked familiar…the quality of the laugh, the way the eyes crinkled at the corners with that special combination of warmth and private sadness.

“Did you know her?” The words left my mouth before I could stop them.

Ava turned, she looked at me with the direct uncomplicated gaze she had always had.

My heart felt like ice bathed in hot water.

“No, she just reminded me of someone I lost.” She said as she sniffled. I could see the tears she was fighting back below her eyelids.

The silence that followed lasted for almost three seconds. Three seconds during which I held Ava Bennett’s gaze and she held mine and I was absolutely certain that everything was about to collapse.

I was afraid that she would see through the different face to the person underneath. And that some molecular recognition would fire between us the way it did between people who had genuinely loved each other. I feared that may be the end of everything.

But she didn’t. She only looked at me with the polite curiosity of someone encountering a stranger in a gallery and then looked back at the portrait.

“Sorry,” she said quietly. “That was a strange thing to say to someone I don’t know. I’m sorry to bother you.”

“No, it wasn’t ” I said. My voice came out completely steady than I had imagined.

She gave me a brief, tired smile…the kind that didn’t quite reach her eyes because the eyes were fighting something else entirely, and she moved on to the next portrait.

I stood where I was for another moment, looking at the portrait of the laughing woman who had reminded Ava of someone she lost. Then I turned and walked in the opposite direction, through the nearest doorway out of the second gallery and into the third. I kept walking until I found a quiet alcove near the far wall where no one was standing.

I pressed my back against the cool stone and closed my eyes briefly. My hands were not shaking. I checked them specifically because I needed to know. Four years of being Selene Arden held that much.

Suddenly, my emotions came rushing. I brought out a small face towel from my bag and pressed it under my eyelids to take out the tears welling up there.

Ava had looked directly at me. She had stood just six inches away from her childhood friend, the same person she had spent the last four years investigating her death, looked directly into my eyes, and had seen a stranger.

I knew intellectually that the reconstruction was complete. But Ava was different. She knew me better than ways that showed on a face but she had looked directly at me this afternoon and seen no one she recognized.

That should have felt like confirmation that the plan was working well and smooth. That every sacrifice, every surgery and every year of rebuilding had achieved exactly what it was designed to achieve but it didn’t feel like that.

Rather, it felt like a specific kind of loss I hadn’t anticipated…the realization that becoming untouchable and becoming invisible were sometimes the same thing, and I had not fully understood the cost of that until the person who knew me best looked at my face and found a stranger there.

I straightened up from the wall as Clara appeared at the alcove entrance; her tablet was in her hand, her expression neutral in the way it became when she had noticed something and was waiting to be told whether to address it.

“Ready?” I asked.

“Whenever you are, Miss Arden.”

I smoothed my dress and walked toward the alcove entrance. “Now,” I said.

I walked out of the alcove and through the gallery and out into the afternoon without looking back toward the second hall.

But in the car, sitting quietly while Marcus drove us back toward the tower, Ava’s words lingered with me and I couldn’t set it aside.

She just reminded me of someone I lost.

That means Ava was still looking, probably still carrying a guilt I didn’t want her to. That kind of love didn’t look for permission, recognition or reward. It just kept going.

I stayed silent throughout the entire drive home.

Because some things were too heavy to think about completely. So, I didn’t.

Maybe not yet.