Morning light spilled into Gigi’s apartment in golden fragments, the kind that brushed across her canvases like approval. The city was already alive outside — cars, vendors, the distant hum of ambition — but she stayed still a little longer, wrapped in that narrow silence between sleep and the day.
For the first time in months, her thoughts weren’t instant of survival.
No boardrooms. No scandal headlines. No heart clawing for what it lost.
Just paint.
And possibility.
The gallery show had gone better than she’d dared imagined. Three of her works sold within the first hour; two commissions followed. Her emails now buzzed with inquiries from names she’d only once read about in magazines.
She was moving forward.
Or trying to.
She pressed her palms together and whispered softly, almost
