Jordan knew, without having to think too hard about it, that this conversation would also be coded into the painting currently in front of her, Portrait of a Nameless Man. She would forever after see the words Quantum Blue and think of this canvas, these long cold nights at the borrowed Fenway studio, Declan Lynch posed in the leather chair, the lights of the city murmuring outside the tall windows behind him. It would forever be tied to her experimentation on the colorful edges in the piece, her decision-making for the palette, her favorite brush getting scrubbed down to nothing and being replaced with a second favorite, and with her attempt to make people feel about her subject the way she felt about her subject, no matter how many decades passed.

Her first original.

Had she made a sweetmetal? She didn’t know.

Declan observed, “You can put that brush down, although it’s very good theater. I know the painting’s done.”

“Who’s the artist here, Mr. Pozzi? Perhaps I’m still studying your mannerisms.”

“That brush hasn’t had paint on it for three days.”

“It’s not your place to question my process. Muses are notoriously ill-used.” She put the brush down. “Matthew said you might be able to get one of your father’s dreams to test it.”

“You can’t tell?”

“Whatever Bryde and them are doing means I can’t feel the sweetmetals like I used to. I don’t need them, not just walking around. I won’t know unless the worst happens.”

“Did it feel different to make it?”

Of course it had. It was her first original, and for the first several sessions, the weight of that had slowed her brush to a crawl. She couldn’t decide how many of her artistic decisions in the piece were being cleverly informed by the artists she’d painted before and how many were simply straight up copied. This was decidedly Turner’s palette, she argued with herself. This was Sargent’s composition. This was still forgery, just good forgery.

But then something had happened on the third sitting. Declan had been telling her a story of John White Alexander’s Study in Black and Green, telling her how sensational it was at the time it was painted, given that the subject of the painting was a woman whose husband murdered her former lover in the middle of Madison Square Garden and got away with it under a plea of temporary insanity. As a footnote, he’d added that John White Alexander was married to Elizabeth Alexander Alexander, a woman who friends had introduced him to at a party because they had the same last name.

Jordan had laughed and her brush, loaded with titanium white, had slipped.

Disaster.