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as she stood under the stinging spray of the shower, she’d remembered the way Ricardo’seyes had burned into hers as he’d gazed at her over that damn champagne glass, and she’d had to lean up against the tiled shower wall, breathless with the memory.
    “Oh, God,” Chelsea groaned as she reached the far edge of Hollenbeck Park, startling an elderly shopkeeper brushing debris from the sidewalk with a straw broom. She gave him a weak smile of apology but didn’t slow: to drop back now would be admitting weakness. Instead, she forced herself to go a little faster, a little harder, her feet painful now on each footfall, the sole of her shoes against the pavement, the impact jarring her bones, her flesh, her very heart.
    By the time she completed the five mile loop, her heart was pounding so hard she thought it might burst out of her chest. Sweat streamed down her face and body, and her muscles were taxed beyond pain, throbbing with effort. Most mornings, she allowed herself to walk it off once she reached the final block, but today she couldn’t risk it; she kept up the pace until she reached her front door.
    When she had finally stripped off her sweat-drenched clothes and stood under the blessedly hot water in her cramped shower, she finally admitted to herself that he wasn’t going anywhere: Ricardo de Santos seemed to have taken up permanent residence in her thoughts.
    #
    The days passed. Chelsea signed a new artist who lived and worked in a tiny beach town fifty miles up the coast. She sold several paintings, enough to pay her rent on both the gallery and her studio apartment, but at the end of the month, she had added only a few hundred more dollars to the savings that was meant to fund acquisitions of her father’s paintings, should they ever come up for sale.
    The last of his works to be sold at auction had fetched nearly a million dollars, however, and at this rate she would never be able to afford even a single piece.
    Long ago, Chelsea had learned that when things seemed hopeless, the best thing to do was to force them from her mind and work harder. When she was fourteen, a runaway who’d run only as far as the edge of Chinatown, she found work sweeping up in a salon in exchange for a cot in the storage room in back and food left over from the restaurant next door. The salon was run by two gay men, and the hairdressers who worked there took to calling her “Mei Mei,” or Little Sister, and they became her family.
    But as lucky as Chelsea was to have found them, the loneliness and the scars from what she had endured pressed in on her at night. Then, she would get up and study the art books she’d checked out of the library and dream and plan for the future. She was never idle. She never allowed her brain to focus on the pain because by always moving forward, she didn’t have to feel it quite as much.
    Even so, two weeks after the encounter with Ricardo de Santos, Chelsea had not been successful in banishing him from her mind. She’d made a few discreet inquiries. A small lie to Meredith—she said Ricardo had mentioned a dealer in New York whose client was searching for a West Coast representative—had netted surprisingly few facts. Yes, he had an apartment in Los Angeles, but Meredith wasn’t sure where. Yes, his reputation among the few dealers who’d worked with him was excellent, but most of his work seemed to be for overseas clients. Meredith didvolunteer that he’d been seen with a number of beautiful women, including an actress currently working on a hot network series and a city councilwoman.
    “You liked our Spanish friend?” Meredith teased. “Thinking of adding him to your rotation?” She had never criticized Chelsea’s lifestyle, but occasionally the older woman voiced a wish that Chelsea would find someone special, someone to settle down with.
    Well, not everyone could be like Meredith and Allan, Chelsea thought privately. Some people would never have that kind of love. That sort of