I look down at my wrist to check the time—I’m not even wearing a watch—and I quickly scratch at a nonexistent itch so that I don’t look like I’m not confident. “We open in fifteen minutes, so I should explain how things work.”

She exhales, seeming more relieved and relaxed than she did before that sentence left my mouth. “Sounds good,” she says.

I walk to You Don’t Exist, God and I point to the confession taped to the wall. “The confessions are also the titles of the pieces. The prices are written on the back. All you do is ring up the purchase, have them fill out an information card for delivery of the painting, and attach the confession to the delivery card so I’ll know where to send it.”

She nods and stares at the confession. She wants to see it, so I take it off the wall and hand it to her. I watch as she reads the confession again before flipping the card over.

“Do you think people ever buy their own confessions?”

I know they do. I’ve had people admit to me that they’re the ones who wrote the confession. “Yes, but I prefer not to know.”

She looks at me like I’m insane, but also with fascination, so I accept it.

“Why wouldn’t you want to know?” she asks.

I shrug and her eyes drop to my shoulder and maybe linger on my neck. It makes me wonder what she’s thinking when she looks at me like this.

“You know when you hear a band on the radio and you have this vision of them in your head?” I ask her. “But then you see a picture or a video of them and it’s nothing like you assumed? Not necessarily better or worse than you imagined, just different?”

She nods in understanding.

“That’s what it’s like when I’ve finished a painting and someone tells me their confession inspired it. When I’m painting, I create a story in my head of what inspired the confession and who it came from. But when I find out that the image I had while painting doesn’t fit the actual image standing in front of me, it somehow invalidates the art for me.”

She smiles and looks at her feet again. “There’s a song called ‘Hold On’ by the band Alabama Shakes,” she says, explaining the reason behind her flushed cheeks. “I listened to that song for more than a month before I saw the video and realized the singer was a woman. Talk about a mind-fuck.”

I laugh. She understands exactly what I’m saying, and I can’t stop smiling because I know that band, and I find it hard to believe anyone would think the singer was a man. “She says her own name in the song, doesn’t she?”

She shrugs and now I’m staring at her shoulder. “I thought he was referring to someone else,” she says, still calling the singer a he even though she knows it’s a she now.

Her eyes flutter away, and she walks around me toward the counter. She’s still holding the confession in her hand, and I let her hold it. “Have you ever thought of allowing people to purchase anonymously?”

I walk to the opposite side of the counter and I lean forward, closer to her. “Can’t say that I have.”

She runs her fingers over the counter, the calculator, the information cards, my business cards. She picks one up. She flips it over. “You should put confessions on the backs of these.”

As soon as those words leave her mouth, her lips press into a tight line. She thinks I’m insulted by her suggestions, but I’m not.

“How would it benefit me if the purchases were anonymous?”

“Well,” she says, treading carefully, “if I were one of the people who wrote one of these”—she holds up the confession in her hand—“I would be too embarrassed to buy it. I’d be afraid you would know it was me who wrote it.”

“I think it’s rare that people who write the confession actually come to a showing.”

She hands me the confession, finally, and then crosses her arms over the counter. “Even if I didn’t write the confession, I’d be too embarrassed to buy the painting for fear that you would assume I wrote it.”

She makes a good point.

“I think the confessions add an element of realness to your paintings that can’t be found in other art. If a person walks into a gallery and sees a painting they connect with, they might buy it. But if a person walks into your gallery and sees a painting or a confession they connect with, they might not want to connect with it. But they do. And they’re embarrassed that they connect with a painting about a mother admitting she might not love her own child. And if they hand the confession card to whoever is going to ring up their purchase, they’re essentially saying to that person, ‘I connected with this horrible admission of guilt.’  ”

I might be in awe of her, and I try not to look at her with so much obvious fascination. I straighten up but can’t shake the sudden urge to hibernate inside her head. Ferment in her thoughts. “You make a good argument.”

She smiles at me. “Who’s arguing?”

Not us. Definitely not us.

“So let’s do it, then,” I say to her. “We’ll place a number below every painting and people can bring you the number rather than the confession card. It’ll give them a sense of anonymity.”

I notice every tiny detail of her reaction as I walk around the counter toward her. She grows an inch taller and sucks in a small breath. I reach around her and pick up a piece of paper, and then reach across her for the scissors. I don’t make eye contact with her when I do these things so close to her, but she’s staring at me, almost as if she’s willing me to.