Jeromey Wrenn's Arc

Chapter 1 of 3

Jeromey Wrenn walked the morning sidewalk with a gallery floor plan folded in their coat pocket. The space didn't exist yet. The money didn't exist yet. But the plan was real, drawn in careful pencil on grid paper, each wall marked with what would hang there. Not the portraits. Never the portraits. Those forty paintings stayed stacked in the corner of their studio, facing the wall. The gallery would be for work they could defend, work they could explain. Work that wouldn't expose them. But then a woman stepped out from the blue tower on the corner, and Jeromey's chest went tight. That face. The slope of the jaw, the set of the eyes, the exact distance between nose and mouth. It was her. The woman from the portraits. The woman Jeromey had invented. She walked past without looking, her shoulder nearly brushing theirs, and disappeared into the morning crowd. Jeromey stood frozen on the sidewalk, the gallery plan suddenly meaningless in their pocket. The portraits weren't invented after all. They were forty paintings of someone real, someone who existed, someone Jeromey had somehow known without ever meeting. Everything had just changed.