POV: Seren Adaeze
He talked for forty minutes and I listened to all of it and by the end I understood roughly three things clearly.
One: the island in the photograph was real, hidden, and connected to his family in ways that went back further than his grandfather's accidental photograph.
Two: Lucian Veyne had spent a significant portion of his adult life and a significant portion of his considerable money trying to locate it properly, and had so far only partially succeeded.
Three: he believed, with a certainty that was not aggressive but was completely immovable, that I was the reason he had not been able to get any further.
Not a problem. A reason. He was careful about the difference.
"I need someone who can read the place," he said. "The island has a specific geography, the kind that doesn't respond to instruments or satellite or any conventional method of navigation. Every time we've sent a team in, they lose bearing within the first hour." He paused. "But you painted it accurately from three thousand kilometers away while you were asleep. So."
"So," I said.
"One week. I need you on the Algarve coast with access to my boat and my team. You map what you see, the way you do it naturally. We document everything. At the end of the week you go home, the money is already in your account, and I don't contact you again unless you want me to."
He named the number then.
He said it the same way he said everything else, flat and direct, no performance, like it was simply the correct number and he had calculated it and there it was.
It was more than I had earned in the previous five years combined. Not approximately. Precisely. I know my own accounts.
I looked at my hands in my lap. I had been doing that a lot in the past hour, looking at my hands, the hands that painted the cliff, the island, all thirty-one of them, without my full participation or consent, looking at them like they belonged to someone else who occasionally borrowed my body to make things.
"You want me to find an island," I said.
"I want you to help me understand what's on it."
"That's a different question."
He looked at me steadily. "Yes."
I stood up. I needed to be standing. "And you think I can do this because I painted it."
"I think you can do it because of what's in the paintings beyond the image itself, the notations in the borders, the symbols you work into the texture." He leaned forward slightly, the first time he had moved toward me in forty minutes. "You don't see them yourself, do you? Not consciously."
My jaw tightened. I did not answer that.
"They match a specific cartographic language," he said. "One my family has been trying to decode for sixty years. You use it without knowing you use it, which means something in you already understands it." A pause. "That's not a skill I can hire. That's not something I can find somewhere else. It's you."
I walked to the gallery window and looked at the street.
The problem was not that I disbelieved him. The problem was that every part of what he said matched things I already knew and had been carefully not examining, the symbols, the accuracy, the way the paintings built on each other like chapters rather than separate works. I had always known at some level that the images were going somewhere. I had just never let myself follow that thought to its end.
He was asking me to follow it, with him.
"I don't know you," I said.
"No."
"I don't know anything about this island beyond what you've told me in the last hour."
"That's true."
"And you want me to get on your boat and go somewhere that your own teams lose their bearings."
"Yes."
I turned around. "Why would I do that."
He was quiet for a moment, not stalling, thinking. "Because you've been living with this for a long time," he said. "And I think that's gotten harder recently. Not easier."
My chest went tight.
He had no way of knowing about this week, about the paintings changing on the walls, about the gold pulse under the grey. He could not know that. But he said it like someone who understood the general shape of the thing even without the specific details, and that was almost worse.
"The money is a genuine offer," he said. "But I think you already know that's not the reason you're still standing here."
I picked up my jacket from the chair. "I'm going to think about it."
He stood. "Of course."
"Don't call me. I'll contact your firm if I decide yes."
"Understood."
I walked to the door. I had my hand on the frame when he spoke again.
"Ms. Adaeze." I stopped but did not turn. "The symbols in the border of your island painting, third row from the bottom, right side." A pause. "They form a directional sequence, a path in. I didn't tell you that during the meeting because I wanted to see if you'd ask." Another pause. "You didn't ask. Which means some part of you already knew."
I walked out without answering.
The rain started two streets from the gallery and I did not have an umbrella. I walked anyway. I went over everything he said and everything he did not say and I built a clean argument for why the answer was no. Stranger. Private island. Teams that lose their way. A certainty about me that he had no right to yet. Every brick of the argument was solid.
By the time I reached my street I was soaked and completely sure I was right.
I took the stairs to my floor. My door was closed when I left this morning, locked, I checked it twice the way I always do.
It was open now, not wide, just slightly, an inch of darkness between the door and the frame.
I pushed it open slowly with my fingertips.
The apartment looked exactly as I left it, paintings on the walls, table near the window, my work coat on the hook by the door.
Except on my desk, where there had been nothing this morning, was a single flower.
Small. White. A species I did not recognize at first. I leaned closer and then I did recognize it, because I had painted it, in the border of the island painting, third row from the bottom, right side, wound between the symbols like punctuation.
A flower that grew on an island no one was supposed to know about.
Sitting on my desk.
Still fresh.