Three years passed.
Then one Saturday, at a weekend market in Brooklyn, everything changed.
I had set up a tiny booth, just a folding table and a few of my canvases clipped to string. I didn’t expect to sell much. I just hoped someone might stop and look.
That someone turned out to be Madeline Sharp, a curator for a respected gallery in Soho. She paused in front of one of my pieces—a painting of a woman in the rain holding a child—and stared for a long time.
“These are yours?” she asked.
I nodded, nervous.
“They’re extraordinary,” she whispered. “So raw. So real.”
Before I knew it, she had bought three pieces and invited me to be part of a group exhibition the following month.
I almost turned her down—I had no one to watch Lily, no clothes to wear to an art show—but Mrs. Carter wouldn’t let me miss it. She lent me a black wrap dress and babysat Lily herself.
