“I’ve been inside already,” Nicole told me. “There are red sold stickers on just about everything! It is just as well I chose my work over the video conference last week or I would have missed out entirely.”

I felt like my knees were going to give way underneath me. “Seriously?” I said. “They’ve sold?”

“Of course they’ve sold!” Françoise chimed in through a mouthful of pastry. “Once the Chapman Gallery bought one, everyone wanted one.”

“The Chapman Gallery?” I was stunned.

“Yes!” Françoise said. “They got the big one at the end. But that’s not my favourite. I like the one we bought better, even if it is a bit smaller …”

Françoise carried on burbling as we all walked inside together, and now I was in the main room of the gallery, and on the walls around me were the works that had dominated the past year of my life. Sixteen paintings in total. And Nicole was right – they all had a red sticker next to them, indicating that all of them had been sold.

“I added them up,” Françoise muttered to me. “You are a millionaire!”

“You see?” A voice behind me said. “I told you you’d become rich and famous in your career.”

I spun around. “Oscar!”

I threw my arms around him and hugged him hard. “You came! I didn’t think you would.”

Oscar smiled. “But I had to come! I wanted to see him.”

He cast his gaze around the walls. “I have missed him so much. Until now, I had forgotten how handsome he always was …”

Oscar’s voice caught a little, choking with emotion as he stared at my paintings. They were of Claude, you see. All sixteen works. Every one of them was a painting of the same black horse with four white socks and a white star on his head. In each of them, my subject was captured in a different pose. In one of the paintings Claude was in motion, cantering free without a rider with his mane and tail flowing in the wind. In another he was caught in close-up so that you could see the details of his muzzle, the whiskers and velvet, the soft sooty blackness of his profile against a bruised lilac sky. And in the big work, the one that the Chapman Gallery had bought, Claude was up on his hind legs rearing and in the background behind his silhouette the streets of Paris were on fire. That one, if the truth were told, was my favourite work too, although I still didn’t find it easy to look at even though I had painted it myself. It was called Terror in Paris.