All Chapters of Go Away Chris : Chapter 91 - Chapter 100

Ayesha's POVThe gallery turned five in September and I marked the anniversary the way I marked most things that deserved marking, which was quietly and with full attention rather than with the kind of ceremony that required an audience to make it feel real. I came in an hour before the staff arrived, which was earlier than my usual morning, and I stood in the main room alone with the specific quality of early morning light that the gallery had before the day began its requirements, and I let the room be what it was for a few minutes without doing anything inside it.Five years was not a long time in the way that centuries or decades were long, but in the specific accounting of a life built from the materials available to you after a significant loss, five years was the kind of span that contained enough to be worth standing still inside for a moment and taking its full measure. The first year had been the year of the treadmill and the meal plan and the charity art night and the Morni

Ayesha's POVIris turned six in November and the birthday party she requested was specific in its requirements in a way that was entirely consistent with her, which is to say it was not the conventional party of games and prizes and entertainment organized by adults for the benefit of children who had not been consulted, but a gathering of the people she had decided were her people, in the house with the garden, with the building blocks available and Gerald in attendance and the understanding that the afternoon would proceed according to whatever the collective logic of six year olds determined rather than any adult agenda.There were seven children and they were all from her class at school except for one, who was Mara's daughter Lily, who was three and who Iris had decided was a person worth including despite the age difference because Lily had a quality of focused attention that Iris considered a prerequisite for her company regardless of age. This assessment of Lily was accurate,

Ayesha's POVThe January after the retrospective was the month I started writing things down in a way I had not done since the blank note on my phone with the three words at the top of it, which had been the beginning of the gallery and which I still had in my phone's notes somewhere under the accumulated record of six years of building.The writing was not a business plan, though it contained some of the elements that business plans contained, and it was not a journal, though it had the quality of something that was honest with itself rather than performing honesty for a reader. It was something between those things, a working document of what the gallery had been and what I understood it to be now and what the next version of it might look like given what Marlene had said about the expansion of its reputation and what Diana's retrospective had demonstrated about what the space was capable of holding.Ken called it the next note, which was a reference to the first one and which was h

Ayesha's POVVincent Reeves was not what I expected, which was itself information about the kind of person he was because the most interesting people rarely arrived in the form their reputation suggested. His reputation suggested a formidable institutional figure of the kind that had opinions delivered as decisions and that treated conversations as negotiations to be won rather than territories to be explored. What sat across from me in the foundation's offices on the Monday morning was a man in his early sixties with the quality of attention I associated with people who had spent enough time in serious rooms to have stopped needing them to confirm anything about themselves and who were therefore free to actually listen to the other person rather than preparing the next statement.He had read everything. That was the first thing I understood from the way he spoke about the gallery, not just the documentary series or the Diana retrospective, though he had clearly watched and read about

Ayesha's POVI told Suki on a Tuesday morning in April, which was the morning I had decided was the right morning in the way that certain mornings declare themselves right for certain conversations, with the specific quality of light and quiet that made the significant feel manageable rather than overwhelming.I told her that I was going to accept the foundation's offer and that accepting it was going to require structural changes to the gallery that I wanted her to be part of shaping, not as an employee being informed of decisions already made but as the person who understood the gallery's operational reality better than anyone and whose participation in the shaping was not optional but essential.She looked at me across the desk with the specific expression she wore when she was absorbing something that was larger than she had expected and was doing the internal work of expanding to hold it, and then she said I thought you were going to take it and I said I know you did and she said