Morning light came through the arched windows of my Paris studio and spread across the wooden floor. The worktable smelled of turpentine, the balcony pots of lavender.
Traffic moved several floors below.
Monet, the calico stray I had adopted, slept on a stack of art history books. She purred whenever I moved a page.
I mixed cerulean blue in front of a blank canvas.
The door chimed. Julian entered with two coffees and set one beside my palette, safely away from the brushes.
Over three years, he had remained my strategist and become my closest friend.
He watched me test the color. “The news came in this morning.”
“Go on.”
“The Sterling Corporation filed for bankruptcy protection. They’re restructuring, and the board removed your father this morning.”
I added white to the blue.
“And
