The room had fallen still the moment the artist stepped out. She wasn’t sure why he’d left—perhaps to fetch a different brush, perhaps because something in her posture had unsettled him. The golden motes drifted lazily in the slanted light, as if time itself had slowed to watch her.

She let her gaze fall to the chair beside her. For a moment, it wasn’t draped in a studio cloth but in her grandfather’s old cardigan, the one he wore even in summer. She remembered standing before him as a child, bare feet on creaking floorboards, performing the little dance she’d invented. A turn, a lift of the heel, a shy flourish of the hand.

“What a wonderful dancer you are,” he had said, his voice warm enough to fill the whole room.