Quinn tried to reclaim his professional rhythm by getting back out into the field, but the Connecticut winter had rewritten the terms of his trade. Daylight disappeared with bruising speed in the early afternoon. Black ice held in the shadows long after the salt trucks passed. The roads felt actively hostile. Gray slush fanned up from trucks and lacquered his windshield in a salty film that his tired wipers could barely smear aside. The town offered few sidewalks and even fewer clean places to leave a car. He weighed every curb and snowbank like a bet before he stepped out.
Each decision, where to park, which block to work, whether a lot looked plowed enough to risk, ran through him as a private safety inspection before he committed. Sometimes the old instincts flared. A sale would land and a brief momentum would return, and for a few minutes he was the rep he had been in California and Florida. He would see the next office building and feel the pull of one more door. Then the light would drop another notch, the streets would start to shine, and the impulse would die in his throat. The fear of being stranded in the dark with the wind cutting through his clothes overrode whatever ambition he could summon. He turned back toward the duplex before the ice could take the night.
Every time he retreated, the sharp urgency of the road dissolved at the threshold. Time loosened. Meals appeared on the kitchen table without him earning them. Plans formed as people drifted through the house and stayed, a rotating cast that made the nights feel already decided. Without any single conscious choice, the rigid discipline he'd built for his routes began to come apart. His days were pushed and rescheduled by the needs and moods of other people, and he let himself move in their momentum.
Because he wasn't paying rent yet, Quinn had no solid contribution to the house. To make up for it, he spent what he had on small gestures. He stocked the fridge. He bought rounds of booze. He came home with winterizing supplies and shoved foam into drafts, taped plastic over windows, tried to make the duplex hold its heat. The spending was meant to square him up, to offset the imbalance of his presence. Instead, each dollar made the imbalance heavier. Each purchase tightened the bond of dependency, anchoring him deeper in a life he couldn't afford to sustain.
His days settled into a conditional loop. Survival depended on variables he couldn't control. If the landlord still held the modified photo against them, the arrangement could be ruined without warning. If Quinn clung too tightly to the house rules, the band's fragile momentum would stall. Riley's attention made the balance worse. She could be warm for an hour, then sharpen without reason, and Quinn found himself trying to anticipate her shifts the way he listened for sounds through the wall. Rest and focus became impossible. Beneath the social anxiety ran the plain arithmetic. Without sales he couldn't live. Each thought leaned on the next in a closed circuit of dependency, and nothing in the circuit offered relief. The dread stayed in him, vibrating, tuned to the thin walls of the duplex.
One night, while they decompressed in the living room, Darren mentioned a job opening with the casualness of someone flicking aside a newspaper. His company had recently acquired a small boutique gallery in Newtown, a quiet one-person operation meant to feed the larger interests. The manager was moving on. The vacancy needed someone who could sell and someone who could pretend to have taste. Darren let the information sit between them, then added, as if it were an afterthought, that he'd already set up an interview for Quinn.
The gallery was a vacuum of curated calm, warm and orderly and profoundly quiet, as if the winter outside had been sealed out at the threshold. The walls were painted a soft neutral, a sterile backdrop for framed work hung with mathematical precision and enough room to breathe. A polished counter sat at the center like a boundary line, separating the public floor from a dim office tucked in back. The room imposed its own pressure. Quinn's voice dropped the moment he stepped inside, lowered by the hush before he could decide to.
An older man sat behind a wide framing table with a stack of paperwork in front of him. He introduced himself as Steve. He owned this gallery, he said, along with several others in the region. Darren hadn't mentioned that. Quinn wasn't meeting a manager. He was sitting across from the architect.
Steve opened a manila folder and began to read. Darren had pitched Quinn as a specialist in direct art sales. The résumé confirmed it in the blunt language of persistence. Self-employed. Business-to-business accounts. Limited-edition framed prints. A decade of canvassing and travel, with the timeline moving backward through California and Florida, each stretch defined by long days, expensive product, and the same grind in different light. There were citations and numbers. Broken records. Regional awards. Years spent training other reps. At the bottom, the earliest line pointed back to California again, to in-home music library programs. Different inventory, identical work. The same trail of small accolades stitched to a life built on knocking and asking.
Steve had bought the gallery the previous year. He didn't seem bothered by the lack of walk-in traffic. Art gave the place its sheen, he explained, but custom framing paid the rent. The gallery was a high-end feeder for his production shop down the road. He needed someone to run the design counter and handle delicate restoration work, but what he really wanted was outreach. Someone to hunt corporate accounts, court interior designers, get inside local offices. Someone to find the clients who would never think to wander into a gallery on their own.
Quinn shifted in his seat and reached for the cadence that had carried him through hundreds of pitches across three time zones. With training, he said, he could handle restoration and the particulars of selling complex framing jobs. When Steve returned to corporate outreach, Quinn let a trace of humor into his voice. In his current setup, he said, he was technically Steve's competition.
The joke hit the room and died there. Steve's expression didn't change. His gaze stayed on Quinn a beat too long, flat and evaluative. He wasn't interested in cleverness. Quinn corrected immediately. He stripped the levity out of his tone and named his real specialty, the disciplined maintenance of corporate accounts.
Steve nodded once. That was what the gallery didn't have.
Quinn leaned into it, but he did not let himself drift. If he was going to represent someone else's business in the field for the first time in years, he needed the boundaries clean. He asked what he could promise a client in the moment and what required approval. He asked what was off the table. He wanted the internal process, the chain of decisions, the limits of his authority. He wasn't going to overcommit and pay for it later with someone else's disappointment attached to his name.
Steve rose in the middle of Quinn's sentence. He moved with an unhurried precision to the frame samples on the far wall and reached out to straighten a strip of gold-leaf molding. It wasn't crooked. He adjusted it anyway, a change so small it was more principle than correction, as if he were testing whether the room would obey. He stepped back, examined the line, and gave himself a brief nod before returning to the framing table.
He said he wasn't interested in putting resources into people who were inherently unstable.
Quinn took the words without blinking. He kept his voice level. He understood the need for a solid foundation. In his experience, loyalty worked in both directions. The room held a hard silence. Somewhere behind the walls, a heater hummed.
Steve closed the manila folder with a snap that ended the review. He stood again and extended his hand across the counter. He would look over the credentials and follow up with Darren before making a final call. Quinn shook his hand, matching the grip without trying to win it. Firm, not aggressive. Professional, not eager. They exchanged a single measured nod, a quiet treaty between two men who understood what a steady paycheck cost.
Quinn pushed through the gallery's heavy glass door and the Connecticut cold struck him hard. The warmth he'd been standing in a moment ago began to feel like something he hadn't earned. Halfway to the car he glanced back. Steve was watching from behind the wide storefront window. The look followed him with a clean, quiet pressure that made him careful in a way he hated. He watched his footing. He did not slip. He crossed the salt-dusted pavement with a dignity that felt rehearsed, then fumbled the keys anyway when his fingers stiffened in the cold. The engine caught on the second labored turn. He let it idle. His breath fogged the windshield into a white sheet while he waited for the heater to wake up. When he finally cleared a small arc through the condensation, Steve was gone. The gallery sat behind him as a closed, hollow box of light against the graying afternoon.