Page 12 of The Awakening of Nina Fontaine

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Nina sipped at her coffee,surveying the people passing by on the other side of the window. After two weeks fighting the crowds at Roast, the tiny coffee shop where she’d first run into Liam McAlister, she’d stumbled onto The Brew coming home from the market. It was still an intimate space, but compared to Roast, The Brew was cavernous, leaving plenty of room for a scattering of tables near the frontwindow.

She’d been hesitant to give up on Roast, then realized she was secretly hoping to run into Liam McAlister again. She could only laugh at herself. As bad as it was to have a school girl crush on a significantly younger man, she wasn’t willing to tread into stalking territory by sticking with Roast when The Brew was more suited to her purpose, which was… well, she didn’t knowexactly.

Most days she took her computer to the coffee shop where she idly searched job listings in Brooklyn. She had no idea what she wanted to do, what she was even qualified to do. She had a degree in Art History with a minor in Philosophy, two of the most useless degrees imaginable, from a small, upstate liberal arts college, and she hadn’t had a job in the last fifteen years, since Peter had suggested the stress of balancing work with their fertility treatments might be contributing to theirineffectiveness.

Afterwards, when it became clear even the most aggressive fertility treatment would never result in a child, she’d been too devastated to contemplate returning to work. Her depression had lasted the better part of a year, after which she and Peter had upgraded houses — to their “forever home,” they’d said — and Nina had thrown herself into orchestrating every detail, as if the perfect home would compensate for the ache of a missing child she felt in herbones.

She wasn’t too worried about money yet. There was enough from the divorce settlement to see her through at least a few months. Longer once she got ajob.

She ignored the voice in her head that said she should have fought for alimony. Peter may have been the one to suggest she leave her job in the creative department of a local magazine, but she hadn’t been bullied into the decision, and no one had stopped her from going back to work once they’d given up on having achild.

Besides, she was an educated, able-bodied woman. She would figure itout.

She turned her eyes back to her laptop screen, scrolled through a couple more job listings, and shut the computer. She stood and slipped on her coat, then slid her laptop into her bag beforestanding.

“Thanks, Iris,” she called out to the young woman behind thecounter.

Iris looked up with a smile. “Anytime! See youtomorrow?”

The piercing in her nose caught the light, and Nina felt a split second of longing as powerful as any she’d felt for a child. Iris was no more than twenty-five, with taut dewy skin, long blond hair pulled into a messy bun, and the bright eyes of someone with an unshakable belief in her ownpossibilities.

Had Nina ever been thatyoung?

“See you tomorrow,” Ninaconfirmed.

She stepped onto the sidewalk, her body recoiling from the cold. The brilliance of the shining sun and lack of snow had made it too easy to forget it was mid-March.

She was about to turn left, her usual route back to the apartment, then changed her mind and went right instead. There was nothing and no one waiting for her. The apartment was spotless, more organized than a Container Store, and she had hours before she was due to meet up with Karen, Robin, and Amy fordrinks.

At first she’d been nervous to wander the city, but it hadn’t taken long to realize that armed with time and her phone, not much could go wrong, and she’d taken to stepping outside at odd times of the day and night, walking around the block or down the street or sometimes just seeing where her feet tookher.

It was still strange to realize she owed nothing to anyone but herself, and her previous sadness was slowly replaced by something that, if not relief, was at least a kind of silver-liningacceptance.

It was late Thursday morning and the streets were quiet, empty of everyone who spent daylight hours in an office, a few lone hipsters keeping a leisurely pace on the sidewalk. They were the most foreign of all her new neighbors — a demographic she didn’t quite understand. Karen called them Millennial Slackers, while Robin was of the opinion that they were getting life right, doing work they enjoyed rather than trading their freedom formoney.

Nina didn’t have an opinion one way or another, although she wanted to know how they paid the rent between band gigs and online sales of homemadejewelry.

She didn’t know how long she’d been walking when a flash of color caught her eyes through one of the windows. She stopped in her tracks, turned to face the glass, and was pulled into a swirl of scarlet, fuchsia, and orange inmotion.

The photograph wasn’t the one at the center of the display — that was an enormous image of flowers floating alongside debris in what looked to be the Ganges River inIndia.

The photo that had caught her eye was small, placed against a tabletop easel on the floor of the display, its corner touching the edge of another photograph. It looked accidental, like the frame had slipped since being placed in the window, and she had the sudden urge to reach through the glass to straightenit.

She leaned in for a closer look, trying to figure out the image. When she got closer she saw that it wasn’t just color in motion — amber beads caught an unseen source of light, shimmering against the fabric of what she now determined to be asari.

There were other things in the background — a lapis lazuli vase, flickering candles, bare feet — but it was the sari that captivated her, that lifted something small and frozen in her chest like a bird takingflight.

She took a step back and looked up at the words painted on the window:StockholmGallery.

She hesitated, then opened thedoor.

Like everything in the city, the gallery was small. A brick wall led from the front window to the back of the room, partially hidden by a frosted glass panel. Photographs were displayed on the brick, white track lighting hanging discreetly from the exposed pipes in the ceiling, highlighting the images that Nina knew belonged to the same artist whose work was displayed in the frontwindow.

The other side of the space was dominated by a pristine white wall. Not a single photo was displayed on its surface, its starkness even more blinding in contrast to the warmth of the brick on the opposite side of theroom.

Nina stepped farther into the gallery and was aiming for the photos on the brick wall when something crashed at the back of the long room. A string of curse words sounded from behind the frostedglass.

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