She ended up an art major because a course she took on the art of Italian Renaissance courts turned out not to count toward her declared history concentration. She wound up back in Manhattan after college because she followed a boyfriend home. She’d found her current apartment when she overheard a man sitting next to her at a bar tell his friend that he’d been transferred to the Los Angeles office and would have to break his lease. The opportunity Drew Campbell handed to Alice came not only when she’d needed it most, but also in a way that felt exactly as it should-natural, discovered, meant to be.

The gallery was in the Fuller Building, one of her favorites. She paused on her way in to admire the art deco features dotted generously inside and out. The opening reception was the artist’s first public appearance in a decade, so she expected the exhibition to be packed. Instead she found plenty of room to pace the spacious gallery, wineglass in hand, as she leisurely studied the overlapping abstract shapes, layered so meticulously on the canvases that it seemed they might leap weightlessly from the wall and float away into the sky.

She noticed him before he ever approached her, flipping through the price list as he admired one of the larger works, a carnival scene in oil. Beneath a few days of fashionable stubble, his face was very severe in a way that was both handsome and out of place in a froufrou gallery, but his clothing signaled he was in the right spot. She watched him speak to the emaciated, black-bunned woman she recognized as the gallery’s owner. She wondered what he’d be paying for the canvas.