Page 63 of Crimson Curse
He looks down at our daughter and touches one finger to her knuckles. She catches him with the sleepy instinct of a newborn and holds on with her whole hand.
We stay long enough for the pale light to deepen on the canvas and turn the greens richer. When the moment has said what it needed to say, we begin to walk. I move the baby higher against my shoulder and feel the warm heaviness of her, that perfect contentment that follows a feeding, a burp, and a sigh.
We pass vitrines that hold small wonders. A ring carved with a design that survived a century of owners. A stitch of embroidery so fine it could be mistaken for paint. The plaques sleep in their brackets, waiting for school groups, docents, and the soft astonishment of a visitor who sees their grandmother’s story reflected here for the first time.
He glances at me as we move through the wide hall. “Are you tired?” The question is practical and tender at once. He has learned to ask it at the right time.
“I’m not tired in a way that worries me,” I answer honestly. “I’m the kind of tired that proves she is feeding well and growing like she means it.”
That draws a smile from him. “She already has an agenda.”
“She’s ours. Of course she does.”
We pause at the arch that leads to the education wing. The space looks different now than it did a year ago. The shelves hold new boxes of supplies. The whiteboard wears a neat diagram of upcoming programs. There is a small corner with soft rugs and a bin of board books for toddlers who come with tired parents and find an hour of delight they didn’t know they needed.
He studies the room as if he is imagining it full. “The foundation’s grant helped here.”
“It did,” I say, and warmth moves through me at the thought of that morning in this same building when the plaque was unveiled and the room filled with applause. “The Carter Foundation for Cultural Preservation is more than a line on a letterhead now. It’s buying paper and pencils, paying teaching artists, and opening doors for kids who haven’t stepped into a museum before.”
“You made that happen,” he replies.
“We made it happen,” I counter, because truth matters.
He falls silent, and when he speaks again the words are softer. “You showed me how to honor the past without living inside it.”
I think about the room in his home that once held a life frozen around a grief he could not move. The painting behind us reminds me that love does not disappear when you open your hands to something new. It changes its shape. It learns to share.
“Memory is not a chain,” I say. “It’s a bridge. It holds more than one truth.”
We keep walking. It feels good to move with him without urgency. The men who guard him don’t follow us down this hall. They wait on the loading dock with coffee and talk while Lex checks the exterior cameras and pretends not to notice that the new mother in the eastern gallery needs this hour to belong to ordinary things.
We fall into an easy conversation about practical things that belong to today instead of yesterday. He mentions a meeting with the museum’s director about collaborative programmingbetween the foundation and the security training courses for staff. I tell him Charlotte wants to host an evening salon to celebrate the artists on the spring roster and that she promises it will be tasteful even though her definition of tasteful is not always aligned with a conservator’s sense of risk. He agrees to fund extra docents for weekend hours because he wants families to see this place as a habit, not a rare event. We talk about naps and the miracle of a swaddle that actually stays put and the way a good stroller can turn a grown man into an engineer.
“Ready?” he asks.
“I am,” I say, and I mean it in a way that includes more than this morning.
We turn toward the far end of the hall where the doors will open later to crowds who will bring their own stories, hopes, and tired children with juice on their sleeves. The marble is warm now where the light has found it. Behind us the painting glows in the soft morning, and I feel the rightness of this choice settle inside me.
We walk forward without fear, our fingers threaded together. The world ahead is wide. The small girl in my arms sighs and sleeps, and the man at my side looks at me like the future is not something we have to fight for every hour. It’s something we can build, carefully and faithfully, and fill with more light than we once believed possible.
THE END