The Weight of Gold
Eleanor felt, in the space before she spoke, the complicated geography of the moment: the genuine happiness for him, the something else that complicated the happiness, and underneath both of those, a question she hadn’t known she’d been sitting on.
“That’s extraordinary,” she said.
“Yes,” he said, in the tone of someone for whom extraordinary and difficult are the same word.
“Why do you look like something terrible has happened?”
He looked at her then — directly, the full weight of the grey eyes. “Because the gallery is run by a woman named Petra Voss,” he said. “And I used to know her. And she’s the one who saw the work. And I need you to know that before you hear it from somewhere else, be