She parked in the narrow, crooked drive. The building was at the corner of Maple and Oak, and in June now, a profuse row of peonies bloomed inside the white picket fence. Typical of old Connecticut towns, Eastwick had tons of pre-Revolutionary history. Her building had once been a house. It was two hundred-plus years old, brick, with tall, skinny windows and a dozen small rooms-which was the advantage. Although something always seemed to need maintenance, from the plumbing to the electricity, she had a dozen rooms to display completely different kinds of artwork. Customers could roam around and examine whatever they liked in relative privacy.

By the time she bolted out of the SUV-and nearly tripped on the cobblestone steps-she was humming. A shipment of Alson Skinner Clark prints was due in late that afternoon. They needed sorting and hanging. And two weeks before, she’d come across an old Walter Farndon oil on canvas that was still stashed in the back room-her workshop-that needed cleaning and repair, which she loved doing. And a room on the second floor was vacant right now, just waiting for her to set up a display of local artists’ work, another project she couldn’t wait to take on.

Her gallery rode the edge of making a profit and not. Emma knew perfectly well she could have run it more efficiently, but she’d always known she had the trust fund coming. It wasn’t the money that mattered to her but the freedom to open up art to the community, to be part of making something beautiful in people’s lives.

She’d never told anyone how important that goal of beauty was to her. The Debs would just roll their eyes at her goofy idealism. Her family would sigh as if she’d never understand practical reality-at least, reality on their terms. And maybe all of them were right, but when Emma opened the ornate red-lacquer door into Color, she felt a sweeping burst of plain old happiness.