“About the painting?” Rian asked.

“Uh huh. Fetched a really good price in that auction that Christie’s handled,” Jade added.

Rian smiled.

“Yeah, you told me already. Like ten times over. I’m really happy for you,” she said.

“So, as I’ve said ten, twenty times over, I think you should really reconsider my offer to give you a percentage of what I got from the auction,” Jade added.

“Yes, we have talked about this. I don’t think your uncle meant for anyone else but you to benefit from that painting …” Rian started to respond.

“How would we know for sure? He must have been a really generous person to think of giving me something, in the first place,” Jade cut in.

Soon after returning from Wyoming, Jade had heard from lawyers who were executing the will of an uncle from her mother’s side who’d passed away in Boca Raton. She told them she’d remembered encountering him sporadically while growing up, including one Thanksgiving when she’d been twelve, and they were still in Cleveland. She’d recently begun to figure out that she was into girls rather than boys, and had started to wear her hair short. A pack of girls in middle school had sensed her confusion over her sexuality, like sharks smelling blood in the water, and had pounced on her, teasing her mercilessly. She’d come home on the last day of school before the Thanksgiving break crying her eyes out. Her uncle had been the first one who’d seen her, because he’d been outside, tidying the garden. He’d comforted her until Jade’s mother wandered out to look for her, and found her leaning on her uncle’s shoulder as they sat on the swing sofa on the veranda, swaying gently back and forth.

From then on, her uncle had sent her gifts from time to time, even when it wasn’t her birthday, or Christmas. A few years after the incident in middle school, she’d overheard from her dad and mom, as they talked casually while relaxing in the couch, a story about her apparently gay uncle.

When she heard about the painting she’d inherited, that her uncle had acquired through an art dealer back in the early 1980s, she flew into a panic.

Ali had said Jade should just have it delivered to her apartment outside of the Brown university campus; Jade had balked at that, thinking that there were probably a lot of things to arrange for a painting like that to be transported all the way from Florida.