If her muse insisted on this repetitive farce, then two could play that game.

The next day, Suzanne didn’t even try to resist the wild internal urgings to yet again paint the man whose face she was coming to know intimately. She just prayed at some stage that cold, hard bitch inside her would be satisfied, and then they could both move on. Until then, she’d continue waving the middle finger at her by refusing to succumb to her muse’s pleadings to paint Grady’s body.

So it was a no-brainer to turn back to Michelangelo, capturing the superlative magnificence of what was, by all accounts, his most famous fresco on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel—The Creation of Adam. Suzanne was thrilled at how she’d nailed both the expression on Grady’s face and the detailed musculature of Adam’s reclining body as she replicated on canvas one half of probably the most iconic art image in the world—the touching of two outstretched fingers.

Except for the addition of that wound just below the midpoint of the right clavicle, it was an exact replica.

Adam but not Adam. Grady. And it was perfect.

The day after, Joshua Grady’s face got the Atlas treatment. The second-century Roman marble version currently residing in a museum in Naples—not the one standing outside the Rockefeller center.

Because, in this bizarre protracted arm wrestle with her muse, why the freak not?

She didn’t do the flowing old-man beard, but the head was all Grady. Grady from the mudroom, his face rigidly impassive as he’d stood there and endured her touch just as Atlas endured his burden, knees bent, back bowed by the weight of it all.

When she was done, she congratulated herself on her choice, the stoicism of Atlas an appropriate match for Rancher Surly. And then there was Grady’s scar, faithfully replicated as she’d done on all the others. It was a fascinating piece of anatomical precision that made the paintings feel more personal.

More Grady.

Her muse was unimpressed but hell, she’d made her bed. If she would just let Suzanne paint something else, anything else—anybody else—things might be different.

Placing her brushes in the sink, Suzanne wandered over to the other four paintings resting against the far wall, evenly spaced apart. Walking up and down the line, several times she eyeballed the art as Keith Urban belted out a ballad. From David to Vitruvian Man and the cute winged cherub to Adam and now Atlas, she didn’t know how to feel about any of them.

This hadn’t been her flexing her artistic wings—it had been some ridiculous power struggle with her muse. There wasn’t much original here, just more replicating other people’s work.

But…they didn’t feel like reproductions—they felt fresh and new.

Because of Grady. Because of his eyes and his mouth and his cheekbones, the granite set to his jaw, the surly calmness of his expression.

And…the shrapnel wound.

“Enough now,” she said out loud to the room. “Enough.” Please, for the love of all that was holy, let it be enough.