“Sweetheart, Sadie Chavez has run a successful art gallery in Denver for a long time, through good times, and a seriously bad recession. She’s done this because she knows good shit. And she wants to debut you and make a big deal of it. Because your shit is good shit.” He got closer. “You’re a fantastic dancer, Hattie. But you’re a knock-your-socks-off artist.”

He lifted an arm straight, finger pointed at the door to my studio.

He then finished softly, “That’s your future, baby. You just gotta have the balls to grab hold.”

“What if people don’t buy it?” I asked.

“They will.”

“What if they don’t get it?” I asked.

“Art is pain. That studio is filled with your pain. And now it’s time to let it go.”

He was talking about more than what was in that studio.

I stared up at Brett.

Brett stared down at me.

When he was done staring, he took my hand and squeezed it.

“Are you ready?” he asked.

I couldn’t say the words.

So I nodded.

I’d dragged him out by his wrist.

He walked me back in holding my hand.

*  *  *

Axl showed twenty minutes later.

Brett and Sadie (and Joe) were gone.

I was sitting on my ass in front of “After,” knees to my chest, arms wrapped around my calves, toe-to-toe with my sculpture in the same pose, except with my head up, when he pulled open the door.

I looked his way.

He saw where I was, his expression morphed right to worried, and he hustled to me.

He got in a squat beside me and asked, “Baby, are you okay?”

“Yeah. Sadie had another appointment, so she had to go. Brett left with her.”

“Sadie? Sadie Chavez?”

“She owns an art gallery by Larimer Square.”

“I know.”

“She’s going to show me. Debut me. Get me in 5280 magazine. Send pictures of my stuff to other galleries. In LA. Aspen. Vail. San Francisco.”

“Are you down with that?”

That was the first question he asked, right off the bat, after I said what I just said.

Brett didn’t ask.

Axl asked.

That was why Axl was there.

And as much as I owed Brett for kicking me in the ass to do this, it was also why he wasn’t.

“I’m scared. She’s going to price the pieces really high and that freaks me out. It freaks me out just people seeing them. But I got really tingly when Brett told me she liked my stuff.”

“Of course she did. It’s fantastic.”

And he thought that, I could see it in his face.

That praise was genuine.

I looked across the studio at the head of a man made out of concrete and rebar.

The expression facing us was a man filled with peace and joy. Even rapture.