Vienna at night is a city to be photographed badly or loved fully. The light off the Danube was different in November — regionally apologetic, like the city itself that had learned how to keep secrets inside museum spaces and polite parlors. We walked the short distance from my studio to the gallery through streets that smelled of baked bread and iron tracks. Maya had a scarf draped over one shoulder like an afterthought, and she moved like someone who had been told the world was fragile and decided to make it steady.
"You're careful," I said.
"You say that like it's a diagnosis," she answered without looking at me.
"Maybe it is." I liked the way she said things in half-sentences, the way she left room for me to finish. "Careful keeps you alive when you have enemies."
Her fingers paused at a tram stop, catching a bead of rain. "Do you have enemies?" she asked in a voice so level it could have been an observation.
I told her half the truth. The other half had teeth. It did not like to be spoken. "Once," I said. "I made decisions when I was younger. People suffered."
Her eyes were briefly a map of curiosity and pity. "People always suffer, Mr. Kaelen. That's history, not a personal curse."
We reached the gallery — an ash-colored building that could have been modest anywhere but seemed quintessentially Viennese in its small, curated arrogance. The woman who ran it, Mrs. Joubert, appreciated artists not for their humility but for their capacity to make other people uncomfortable with beauty. She liked to watch people grow flammable.
Inside, the painting we'd been assigned glowed under conservation lamps. Maya moved around it like someone moving through a house she loved. She'd been trained to see the layers and the lies hidden underneath varnish. She could coax a secret out of paint better than anyone I'd met.
We talked about technique, about how some pigments react to air like memory to pain. She had an odd way of describing restoration: that it was an act of diplomacy with time. I liked that. It was what I did with the camera — negotiate with what would remain. We argued softly about whether every restoration should be true to the artist's hand or to the audience's expectation. It was the kind of debate people have when they are learning how to trust each other.
When the gallery closed and the cleaning staff had left, we stayed. We let the city hum like a low engine outside and focused on the painting's thin, deliberate cuts. The more time I spent near her, the more certain I felt that if I wanted to save anyone from the collector, I would have to save them without telling them everything. There was no noble plan that involved everyone knowing the accounting. Secrets protected people as well as harm sometimes.
At the end of the night she tucked a loose curl behind her ear and laughed at something I had said. The sound was small and private, and I felt it like wind moving over dry leaves. There was a seam in me that closed when she laughed, as if someone had stitched an old wound. I didn't know if it would hold.
The next morning there was a folded note in the studio doorway when I stepped outside. It was blunt: STOP WORKING ON THE CANVAS. No signature. No threat, only the implication. The handwriting was clean enough to be ironic. Whoever left it wanted me to know the collector could be polite and still kill reputations the same way he killed careers.
That was when the ember between us flickered into a question. How much could I pull into light before it began to burn everything I loved?