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She flung the drape back from the huge painting of Rai and gazed at it. It stabbed at her from all directions, pain and grief and hurt and shame and loss, but she didn’t turn away, didn’t flinch. Let all the stabs come at her as they may. Turned off her defensiveness and really looked.

It wasn’t a bad painting, actually. Rai was a gorgeous enough subject to make anyone take notice, and while she hadn’t captured his inner light, she had rendered his physical beauty accurately.

She could probably sell it just as it was, use the same skills to paint a dozen more paintings with the same layered glazes, following the same formal rules of composition, play it safe in the confines of classicalism.

She could use her dad’s name to appeal to his former clients, use the superficial similarities between his work and this as a marketing strategy.

The clerk at the art supply store would smile maternally as she pinned the invitation postcard to the bulletin board, tell everyone who came in that Norman Farber’s girl was following in his footsteps.

But Rai had been right. This painting wasn’t her.

Wasn’t her, and wasn’t Rai, and wasn’t her father, either.

And the last thing her father had ever wanted was for her to be exactly like him.

He’d sat and painted right alongside her and been overjoyed when her paintings of the landscape had been entirely different from his.

Had been so proud of her work that he’d showed off her Instagram to strangers.

If he’d been alive today, he would have wanted her to fly.

He would have told her to take a chance, to leap into the void, to put her soul on the canvas and laugh at anyone who got in her way.

To be the daughter he and her mother had raised, who she’d been before she’d let Brendan stifle and pollute and steal her light.

Her brushes were clean by the sink. Her palette was on its shelf, tubes of paint beside it.

And she didn’t have Rai to look at anymore, but…

she had him inside. The feel of him, the essence of him, his love, his desire, his affection, even his sulky pouts, everything he’d poured into her, clean and pure and the opposite of safe.

She was overflowing with him now, and she wasn’t afraid. Not anymore.

She gathered her supplies and started to paint .

It wasn’t technically alla prima, not with a whole completed painting as the base, but she wasn’t waiting for the paint to dry, either.

Wet in wet, glazes of brilliant color, slashes of light and dark, broad strokes and clear washes and delicate details.

The rules she’d learned were still in her, the skills, the techniques—she knew all the rules, but they weren’t her cage anymore.

They were a framework, a trellis, something she could move over and through and above, something she could break if she needed to, and she laughed as she shattered them, turned them to her purposes, built something new out of the pieces.

Something that was entirely Rai, and entirely her, and entirely full of light.

She painted for hours, until the noontime sun dipped low in the western windows and she forced herself to pause, go visit her mother for dinner, take another look at her laptop and the things she should do, and walk right back out to her studio to pick up her brushes again.

It wasn’t until the sky was just beginning to lighten in the east and she was dizzy from what had poured through her that she set down her palette, stretched the muscles of her back, and let herself look at the canvas again.

It might not be done. She’d have to let it sit, have to come back with fresh eyes to see if it needed anything else.

And she wished she could show it to Rai, see what he thought of it.

He might not have the words to express what he saw, the formal vocabulary of art, but he saw things with his clear, storm-full eyes.

Things that she maybe hadn’t wanted to see, maybe hadn’t wanted to face, but once he’d pointed them out to her, couldn’t unsee.

He saw with perfect clarity and zero filters.

And with all that clarity, all that insight, he’d seen her, bedraggled and enraged and despairing on the veranda of the rec center, and he’d fallen in love.

Fallen in love with who she was, who he saw, even when she was so weighed down in the muck that she couldn’t see it for herself. Couldn’t remember who she was.

And now she could see it, too. It was right here on the canvas. This was her. Rai had seen it in her all along, but she’d just…forgotten.

And she refused to ever forget again.

She should be tired, should be exhausted, but instead she was full of energy, and as her eyes traveled past the maybe-finished painting to the lightening sky in the east, she knew what she needed to do.

One painting wasn’t enough for a gallery, was it?

She needed more. She needed to keep on remembering herself, keep on pouring herself out onto the canvas.

Then she could call the number on the business card Heather had given her and take yet another leap.

And hell, if that was still a bust, there were dozens of galleries in Tucson.

Maybe even hundreds. She could call all of them, if she had to .

She just needed a body of work.

Decision made, she hurried to clean her mess, pack her travel palette.

She gathered her supplies—shade umbrella, folding chair, easel, brushes, solvents, stretched canvases.

Empty gallon jugs filled with filtered water— hydrate or die-drate , she thought giddily—and the small cooler at the very back of the studio, a bit dusty but still functional.

She dragged it all out to her car and loaded it into the trunk.

Her mom was still asleep when she crept into the house, so she tiptoed around the kitchen, gathering a day’s worth of snacks and sandwich fixings, brewing a thermos of coffee, giggling under her breath as she put her laptop all the way away for good measure.

Once she had it all ready to go—still well before sunrise—she got a notebook out of her mother’s desk and frowned at the page.

She couldn’t go anywhere without leaving her mom a note, no matter how good things had been lately.

Even if she was just doing what she and her dad had done a dozen times before.

She thought for a bit, then shrugged. Less is more.

She’d be back before her mom had time to worry too much. She bent and scrawled a quick note.

Mom, I’ve got some things I need to do this morning. Remembering who I am. Don’t worry, I have lots of water and nutritious food and a power bank for my phone, though I might not have phone service some of the time. I’ll be back for lunch. Love you! Poppy

After a moment’s thought, she wrote the emergency number for her mom’s psychiatrist on the page. Not that she’d be gone long enough for her mom to worry, not with how positive she’d been lately, but just in case.

Leaving the notebook on the kitchen counter, she hurried out to start her car. She didn’t want to waste any more time, or miss the morning light. She’d always liked the earliest light of dawn best for painting, how pink it turned the Arizona sands.

The sun still hadn’t quite risen when she reached her destination, though before she’d pulled off onto the dirt ranch road, she’d seen the barest fingers of morning light limning the upper reaches of Kitt Peak.

The mountains in this area weren’t nearly as high as that and were still shadowed and purple when she made it past the last abandoned cattle ranch to the road’s end.

But that was what she’d wanted—the weather app had predicted a high in the low hundreds again, and the more painting time she could get in before the heat drove her back to the car, the more she’d have to show off later.

She had to turn on the dome light and rummage under the seats to find her big flashlight so that she didn’t stumble over rocks in the pre-dawn, but she still managed to get loaded with her supplies and safely into the hills in time to capture the rosy dawn on the first of her canvases, take a few photos with her phone for later reference.

It wasn’t the same without her father. She’d known it wouldn’t be, but hadn’t been fully prepared for the stab in her heart when she’d caught just the right expression of color and light and wanted to share it with him.

But the longer she painted, the more she felt he was there, like he was looking over her shoulder with approval, and by the time she decided to call it quits, a little past noon, she had seven small paintings.

Not enough for a show, but enough to show, to maybe convince a gallery owner to give her a chance to do more, and while she didn’t want to jinx herself, when she laid them out around her on the sandy rocks, she had a good feeling about them.

They weren’t tame at all. Not safe. Not boring. And she could almost hear Rai’s voice in her ear, telling her what he saw. They are you.

She’d decided while she was painting that she was going to unblock him.

It hadn’t been fair to block him in the first place, and she knew it must have hurt.

She wouldn’t harass him, of course, or expect him to stay in contact, but he should, at the very least, get to see the completed portrait.

He’d paid for it, after all. It was his.

And he might want it, now that it was fixed.

And if he didn’t, if he wanted nothing more to do with her at all, at least he’d have a choice in the matter.

She was assuming he hadn’t blocked her right back, of course, but…

that seemed too petty for Rai. He was a lot of things, but he’d never been petty, not toward her.

So when she got home, she’d take a few photos of the portrait and send them to him, along with an apology.

Something along the lines of sorry I’m a rabid trauma ferret but you were right all along.

With some emojis. That would at least make him smile.

Contacting him again was going to be another leap, of course, but now that she’d given up on being safe, possibly for good, she didn’t feel as sick about it as she once would have.

She was all about taking chances now. She fucking loved taking chances. She couldn’t wait to take more chances, leap out into the void knowing it would catch her.

Rai would catch her. Somewhere inside, she knew he would.

She took a few more pictures with her phone before heading back down the hill, picking her way through the jumbled rocks to load everything back in the trunk of her Kia.

She laid the wet paintings on the very top, wedged so they wouldn’t jostle and smear on the bumpy drive home, tossed the few things that wouldn’t fit in the trunk on the back seat, and hopped behind the wheel.

It was a little later than she’d planned, but she could send her mom a text once she had cell phone service again, give her an ETA and a reassurance that everything was fine.

Poppy smiled, picturing the paintings in her trunk. Everything was more than fine. Everything was amazing.

She turned her key in the ignition.

Her car clicked and growled and whined, but didn’t start.

“No,” she whispered in growing dismay. “No, no, no. ” She turned the key again, and again, swearing when the growl of trying-to-start was fainter each time.

“I just fixed you,” she whimpered. “You were fixed. It was the alternator, and they fixed it and charged the battery and fixed the A/C while they were at it. I paid nine hundred dollars for you to be fixed . What the hell —” She shut her mouth with a snap and tried again.

This time when she turned the key in the ignition, she saw a tiny, wan flicker out of the corner of her eye and turned in horror to stare at the dome light.

The dome light she had turned on that morning to look for her flashlight, and oh god , had she not turned it off again?

She hadn’t. She’d left the dome light on, and then she’d gone and painted for hours and now…

Now she was stranded. Stranded at the dead end of the dead-endiest of dirt roads, with nobody to blame but herself.

And it was way too hot to start walking now, if she didn’t want to keel over half a mile down the road.

She’d have to wait until the sun was at least halfway to the horizon before she could chance it.

Well, fuck. Fuck fuck fuckety fuck. She thudded her head into the steering wheel.

Maybe she should have paced herself on the taking-chances thing.

But okay. She could do this. She could take a little siesta, drink the rest of her water, then start walking as soon as she felt up to it.

She’d done enough of it when her car was out of commission that she had strong legs, and her shade umbrella was huge.

She’d carry just what she needed most, get to where she had cell phone service, and call 911 and her mom.

Then send out a tow truck later for the car.

It was going to be fine. And risk was just part of the game, now that she was into taking chances.

She couldn’t expect all of her leaps of faith to land her in clover.

Poppy just had to hope that her mom didn’t spiral too far while she was rescuing herself.

Because that’s what she was going to do. Rescue her own damn self.

And she wasn’t going to think too hard right now about what would happen if she didn’t .

She opened all the car doors to allow a crossbreeze, found the shadiest spot in the car to rest, connected her phone to her solar charger, and settled in to wait.