“Wise answer.” Oliver was crouched on the floor near the front door, uncrating a large painting, and he didn’t even look up from the task when he spoke.

Adam grinned. “Well, if you change your mind, you know where to find me,” he said, and he continued walking through the foyer and out the front door of the gallery.

Oliver and I were quiet for a moment as I worked on the mural and he pulled the well-padded painting from the box. Finally, he spoke. “Adam’s got a girlfriend,” he said.

I smiled to myself. “Like I care.”

He chuckled. “Just sayin’…”

“I think I’ve just been without for too long.” I felt embarrassed that any attraction I felt for Adam might be obvious.

“No guy in your life?” Oliver asked.

It took me a minute to answer. “I think it’s best if I just focus on myself for a while,” I said, meaning it. I stopped cleaning for a moment, resting my hands on a rung of the ladder as I thought about Trey. “I had a boyfriend,” I said. “I thought he was really pretty awesome, but it turned out he wasn’t.”

“Ah,” Oliver said, his focus still on freeing the painting from the thick padding that surrounded it. “You got a wake-up call, huh?”

That was one way to put it. “It’s complicated,” I said, not wanting to get into everything about the accident. “So how about you?” I asked. “Do you have a girlfriend?”

“I lived with a woman for five years. Till last year,” he said. He held the painting—sunflowers on a blue background—upright in front of him to study. I knew it was one of the student pieces. The more valuable art would be brought in by escorts and packed in heavy wooden crates. We would see none of it until the gallery’s security system was in place. “She wanted to move to California, pretty desperately,” Oliver continued. “And I wanted to stay close to my son, also desperately.”

“Are you sad you couldn’t make it work?”

“There were other problems, more minor, but taken all together, it was time to end it.”

“Her loss,” I said, and I meant it.

He smiled across the room at me. “Thank you,” he said. He leaned the painting against the wall near some of the other student work that had come in.

I returned his smile, then popped in my earbuds and went back to cleaning the mural. The spot I’d just worked on revealed drops of tea flying through the air. They were perfect, glistening, a catch light in each one. Not for the first time, I admired Anna Dale’s exquisite work.

“Come look at this, Oliver,” I said, taking my earbuds out again.

Oliver was opening another package, which he set down on the floor before crossing the foyer to the mural.