POV: Seren Adaeze
The letter is sitting on my kitchen table when I get back from my morning class, and I nearly walk past it.
It came through the gallery, forwarded by the auction house with a sticky note from my contact there that says only: Read this properly. Sit down first. I pull out a chair and sit, mostly because being told to do something by a sticky note is somehow enough when you slept two hours and spent the rest of the night staring at paintings that glow.
The envelope is thick, the kind of thick that costs money on its own. I open it.
The law firm's name is printed at the top in small, very serious letters. Three partners, all surnames, the kind of name arrangement that means old money and no sense of humor. The letter is two pages and I read the first paragraph three times before any of it lands.
Two million euros.
Paid at auction three days ago. One of my paintings. The staircase painting, the one I hung last night after making it in my sleep, except this was a different staircase painting, one I made eight months ago and submitted to a group exhibition mostly because I needed the wall space back. I did not expect it to sell at all.
Two million euros is not a number that belongs in my life. My best month last year was forty-two hundred. I have a savings account with enough in it to cover rent for four months if I stopped eating. I teach two art classes a week to keep the lights on.
I read to the second page.
The buyer's name is listed as a corporate entity, a holding company with an address in Lisbon and a name that tells me nothing. The law firm represents them. All communication goes through the firm. The buyer will not be providing personal identification.
I put the letter down and look at the window for a while.
My phone rings. Dami.
I pick up.
"Did you read it?" she says immediately, not hello.
"How do you know about it?"
"The auction house called me when they couldn't reach you. Seren." Her voice goes up on my name in a way that means she is about to be unreasonably excited. "Two million. Two. With six zeroes."
"I know how many zeroes it has."
"You do not sound like a person who knows how many zeroes it has."
She is right. I sound like someone reading a document in a language they mostly understand but not completely. I pick the letter up again.
"The buyer won't give a name," I say.
"Rich people do that. It's normal."
"Is it?"
"Yes. They buy things through companies so other rich people don't know what they're spending. It's a whole thing." I can hear her moving around, pacing probably. "This is your life changing, do you understand that? This is the thing. This is it."
I am looking at the number again, two million euros in clean official font, sitting on my table like it arrived at the wrong address.
"Something feels off," I say.
Dami goes quiet for exactly one second, that is her limit for patience with what she calls my habit of treating good things like they have hidden teeth. "Off how?"
I do not know how to answer that without sounding like I spent the night watching my paintings rewrite themselves. So I say: "I'll call you later," and hang up before she can argue.
I read the rest of the letter.
The second page is mostly legal language about payment processing and transfer timelines. I skim it. At the bottom, there is a short paragraph about the buyer's request for a private viewing meeting, should I be willing, to discuss potential future commissions.
Fine. Strange, but fine.
I turn the page over.
There is a third page I missed, shorter, just a few lines at the top, then white space, then a single line printed in very small type at the very bottom of the sheet.
The few lines say that the buyer has purchased three of my works in the past eighteen months, not just this one, three. The other two I sold through a smaller gallery downtown for amounts that seemed reasonable at the time, eight hundred here, twelve hundred there. I thought those went to a private collector in Porto. According to this letter, they did not. They all went to the same holding company.
Someone has been collecting my work, specifically, quietly, for over a year.
My hands are still on the table. I notice this because I expected them to move.
The timeline sits in my head and does not improve with thinking about it. Eighteen months ago I was nobody. I had a small gallery showing and a class I taught on Thursday evenings and paintings I made in my sleep that I sold quickly because keeping them too long made me uncomfortable. Nobody was paying attention to me eighteen months ago.
Except apparently one person was.
I look at the small print at the bottom of the third page.
It is easy to miss, smaller than everything else on the page, right at the edge of the footer, the kind of placement that makes you wonder if it was put there to be missed or put there to be found by the right person.
The buyer wishes you to know he is aware of the nature of your work. He looks forward to meeting at your convenience. He also wishes to note, as a matter of transparency, that he is already familiar with your current address.
I read it again.
Then once more, slowly.
Already familiar with your current address.
Not that he found it through the auction house, not that the gallery provided it, already familiar, as in before this letter, as if it is a small clarification, a polite detail, something offered as courtesy rather than warning.
I sit very still.
The staircase painting on my wall is in my direct line of sight from the table. I do not look at it. I look at the letter, at the small careful words at the bottom, at the name of the law firm and the holding company and the address in Lisbon.
Someone has been watching my work for eighteen months, buying it through different channels so I would not notice the pattern, and they want me to know they know where I sleep.
And they are calling this transparency.
My phone is in my hand. I do not call Dami.
I dial the number at the top of the letter.