Chapter 66: New Year’s Eve

New Year’s Eve was quiet.

Not the loud city kind. Eleanor’s brownstone kind, which meant a smaller gathering than Christmas but no less full of feeling. Daniel had stayed through the week, easing into the family with the careful gratitude of someone who understood he was being given something he had not earned and was determined not to take it for granted.

We were all there. Eleanor and Marcus and Catherine. Daniel. Damien and Noah and me. Even Victoria, who arrived at nine with a quiet smile and sat beside Marcus with her hand resting on the small curve of her stomach, the two of them talking in low voices that had the particular ease of people who had decided, finally, to simply be honest with each other and had found it considerably less complicated than the alternative.

Noah had been allowed to stay up until eleven on the condition, negotiated at length, that he would not complain about bedtime afterward. He had agreed with the gravity of someone signing a binding contract.

At eleven thirty he was asleep on the couch with Gerald, having made it almost to the finish line.

The rest of us sat in the warm sitting room with the fire going and the windows dark and the particular quiet anticipation of a year ending. Eleanor poured something sparkling into glasses for the adults and something that looked similar but was not for Noah’s glass, which sat untouched on the table beside him, because he had insisted on having one even if he was asleep before he could drink it.

“To this year,” Eleanor said, raising her glass. “And to everyone who found their way to this table.”

We drank.

I looked around the room. At Daniel, who had flown across an ocean on Christmas Day because he was afraid of losing his courage. At Catherine, who had spent eight years invisible and was now sitting in a lit room with people who knew her name. At Marcus and Victoria, who had built something honest out of something that had not been. At Eleanor, whose structures had finally held the people they were built for.

At Damien, beside me, his hand finding mine the way it always did.

This year had contained everything.

And it was ending, gently, in a warm room with a fire and people who mattered.

My phone buzzed at eleven fifty seven.

I almost did not check it. It was New Year’s Eve and the moment was full and whatever it was could wait three minutes.

But something made me look.

The message was from the security company that monitored the building in the West Village. Automated, but flagged urgent.

Fire alarm activated. 3rd floor. Fire department dispatched. Building being evacuated.

I sat up.

“Mia,” Damien said, reading my face immediately.

I showed him the phone.

His expression changed completely.

“The paintings,” I said. My voice did not sound like mine.

He was already standing.

“Eleanor,” he said. “Can you stay with Noah.”

“Go,” Eleanor said. She was already moving toward the kitchen for coats, the particular efficient calm of someone who had absorbed a crisis and was converting it immediately into action. “Go now.”

Daniel stood too.

“That is my sister’s work,” he said quietly. “I am coming.”

We did not argue.

The drive into Manhattan at midnight on New Year’s Eve should have taken forty minutes. Thomas got us there in nineteen, navigating through the fireworks and the crowds and the chaos of the city celebrating with a focus that none of us thanked him for properly because none of us were capable of speech.

I held my phone the entire way.

No further updates.

I thought about the eleven paintings. The street with the interior light. The woman at the window. The kitchen table with two cups. The eleventh painting.

Just the light.

Thirty two years facing the wall and then finally, finally turned outward, greeted by a four year old with a rabbit, weeks away from Paris.

If they burned.

I could not finish the thought.

Damien’s hand was tight around mine. He was not saying anything reassuring because there was nothing reassuring to say that would not have been a lie, and he had learned, by now, that I did not want the lie.

We turned onto the street.

Fire trucks. Lights cutting red and white through the dark. A crowd of residents in coats over pajamas standing on the pavement, the particular displaced look of people who had been woken from their lives. Smoke, visible against the streetlights, coming from somewhere in the building.

The third floor.

Rosa’s floor.

I was out of the car before it fully stopped.

A firefighter caught my arm before I reached the building. “Ma’am, you cannot go in there.”

“My family’s work is in there,” I said. “On the third floor. Apartment C. Paintings. They are irreplaceable. Please.”

“The fire started on the second floor,” he said. “Electrical fault in apartment 2B. We have it largely contained but the building is not cleared yet.”

“Apartment C,” I said again. “Third floor. Please.”

He looked at me, at my face, and something in it made him speak into his radio.

“Status on three C,” he said.

A pause that lasted longer than any pause had ever lasted in my life.

The radio crackled.

“Three C is smoke damage only. Fire did not breach the floor. Contents appear intact.”

I stood on the pavement and felt my legs nearly give out.

Damien’s arm was around me immediately.

“Intact,” I said. To no one. To myself. “Smoke damage only.”

“The paintings,” Daniel said, beside me, his voice tight.

“Intact,” I said again.

Smoke damage was not nothing. Smoke could settle into canvas, into the fibers, in ways that required careful and expert conservation. But smoke damage was a problem that could be solved.

Fire was not.

We stood on the pavement for two hours while the fire department finished their work. The building’s residents were given the all clear to return around two in the morning, the second floor cordoned off and the rest of the building, smelling sharply of smoke but structurally sound, reopened.

I went up to the third floor with a firefighter escort.

The apartment smelled like smoke, a sharp acrid presence that clung to everything, but the eleven paintings stood exactly where I had left them, facing outward into the room, untouched by flame.

Smoke had settled on the surfaces. A grey film, fine as dust, across thirty two years of canvas.

I stood in front of the eleventh painting.

Just the light.

Through the grey film, the light was still there.

Dimmer. Obscured. But there.

I called Isabelle Laurent at three in the morning Paris time without thinking about what time it was there, and she answered on the second ring with the alertness of someone who had not been asleep, and I told her what had happened.

“Do not touch anything,” she said immediately. “Do not attempt to clean it yourself. I am calling my conservation team in New York within the hour. Smoke damage on canvases this age requires specific expertise but Mia.” Her voice steadied. “It is treatable. The paintings are not lost. Do you understand me. They are not lost.”

I closed my eyes.

“I understand,” I said.

I hung up and looked at the eleven paintings, grey and dim and smelling of smoke, and thought about Rosa Santos, who had survived a man telling her painting was a hobby, and thirty two years facing a wall, and now this.

The light was still there.

It always was.

It just needed, again, someone to clean the surface and let it through.

Behind me, Damien put his hand on my shoulder.

“They are going to be alright,” he said quietly.

I looked at the eleventh painting through the grey film.

“Yes,” I said. “They are.”

And outside, somewhere over Manhattan, the new year’s fireworks were still finishing, scattered and late, lighting up a sky that none of us had been watching.