POV: Seren Adaeze
I want him to be wrong.
That is the only thing I know clearly while I stand here holding his grandfather's photograph next to my own painting. I want there to be a difference I missed, an angle that does not match, a shadow falling the wrong way, something small enough that I almost overlooked it but enough to pull the whole comparison apart.
There is nothing. I have been looking for four minutes and there is nothing.
Same cliff. Same fist-shaped rock cluster at the base. Same narrow path cut into the stone at exactly the same gradient. My painting even has a faint waterline at the bottom left, a wet darkness where the sea had been recently. The photograph has it too.
I put both down on the small table near the window and step back from them.
Lucian has not moved. He is watching me the way you watch someone do a calculation, patient, not helping, just waiting for the answer.
"Where did your grandfather take this," I said, not really a question.
"Atlantic coast. He chartered a boat. He said he found it by accident in fog and when the fog cleared he took the picture because he did not trust his own memory." A pause. "He spent the rest of his life trying to find it again."
"And he never did."
"No."
I looked at my painting. I made it on a Thursday in March, fourteen months ago. I know this because I woke up that morning with charcoal under my fingernails and the finished piece propped against my bedroom wall. I submitted it to the group show three weeks later because I could not stand looking at it every day.
"I don't know how I paint them," I said. "I've never known."
Lucian was quiet for a moment. "That's not quite what I asked."
"I know what you asked."
"Then answer it differently."
I turned to look at him. He was not pressing, not leaning forward, not doing any of the things people do when they want something from you. He was just standing there with his hands still at his sides and his eyes on me, and I had the strange sense that he had more patience than I had resistance.
"I paint in my sleep sometimes, or close to it. I don't see a location first. I don't plan anything. I wake up and it's there."
He nodded slowly, like I had confirmed something rather than surprised him. That was the part I could not fit into any normal shape. He was not surprised, he had not been surprised since he walked through the door. Whatever I said, he received it like information he was sorting rather than information he was hearing for the first time.
"You already knew that," I said.
"I suspected it."
"How."
He reached into his jacket again. "The brushwork in your cliff painting is consistent with someone working quickly, without revision. There are no correction marks underneath, I had it scanned before the auction. Whatever your process is, it moves in one direction, forward." He looked at the wall. "All of them, every piece I bought, same thing."
I thought about saying something about the ethics of scanning a painting you don't yet own. I decided to save it.
"You had them analysed," I said.
"Yes."
"Before you contacted me."
"Yes."
I picked up the photograph again because I needed something to do with my hands and also because I needed to stop looking at him for a moment. He was too steady. People who want something from you are usually nervous or performing confidence to cover the nerves. He was neither, he was just present in a way that was hard to look at directly for too long.
"These aren't abstract," he said quietly. "I don't think they ever were. I think you've known that."
The room went a little smaller.
Seventeen years of calling them abstract because the alternative was saying: I paint real places I have never been, I paint them in my sleep, and every single one of them is accurate. Saying that out loud had always felt like standing at the edge of something with no visible bottom.
"What do you want from me," I said, direct, I needed direct.
"I want to show you something else." He reached into the jacket one more time and I almost told him to stop, almost said whatever else he had in there could stay there, but I did not.
He put a second photograph on the table.
This one was in color, recent, shot from a boat looking at a piece of land rising from the water, green and dense, with a stone formation at its southern edge that curved like a jaw. The light in the photograph was warm and low, late afternoon.
I looked at it for a long time.
I did not want to say what I was thinking.
"Third shelf," I said finally. "From the left. On the back wall."
He turned and looked at the painting I meant. He walked to it. He stood in front of it for a moment and then looked back at me over his shoulder, and his expression was not surprise and not satisfaction either. It was something more worn than both of those things, something that had been carried a long way.
"You painted this four years ago," he said.
"Three and a half."
"We found this island," he picked up the photograph from the table, "two years ago. It does not appear on any navigation chart, any satellite image, any record we can locate. It took my family's resources and six months of search to locate it." He set the photograph down. "You painted it a year and a half before we found it."
The room was very quiet.
"Tell me how," he said.
And that was the moment I understood that this was not a conversation about art or money or even about a very old photograph. This man had not spent eighteen months quietly collecting my work because he appreciated the style. He had been building a case, carefully, patiently, the way people do when they are certain of the conclusion and need the evidence to catch up.
He was certain of something about me, something I had spent seventeen years making sure no one would ever be certain of.
"I think," I said carefully, "you should tell me what you actually know before I say anything else."
He looked at me for a moment. Then he pulled out a chair and sat down. For the first time since he walked in, he looked like someone who had been standing for a very long time.
"That," he said, "is going to take a while."