The studio smelled of turpentine and lemon scrub, a chemical cleanliness that Evelyn had come to prefer over the unpredictable odors of other people's lives. Lamps with adjustable arms cast a patient light across the canvas propped on an easel; the portrait's surface glowed under her red filter like a fossilized memory. She worked with tiny tools — scalpel, swab, sable brush — instruments of reunion and restraint. Her hands moved with a learned economy, every motion calibrated to reveal without destroying, to lift a discolored layer and meet the paint beneath with respect. Restoration, she had been taught, was not erasure. It was an argument with time in which you aimed to preserve the dialogue.
She liked the tactile certainty of it: a varnish that flakes in tiny predictable curls, an underdrawing that shows in charcoal ghost-lines when the top layer is thinned. The household photos and family commissions paid the bills, but the private pieces were what kept her awake. She could spend weeks coaxing an old face back into a kind of present-tense tenderness, scraping away patina until the person under the yellowing film looked at her and, for a moment, answered.
Perfection was a fiction she tolerated; what she prized was fidelity, the discipline to accept that some losses must be acknowledged while others could be coaxed back. She kept lists in a thin notebook: solvent mixtures, humidity readings, the kind of stretcher bars that would not warp under a certain tension. The notebook lived beneath her scalpel roll, in the drawer where she also kept her keys and a faded photograph she did not like to examine. Today the photograph's edges stuck out like a secret. A small blister had lifted where someone — months or years before — had pressed too hard with a fingernail. Evelyn tilted the lamp and considered the portrait. A varnish remained that would not respond to her first pass. It resisted the solvent in a way she rarely encountered: it gathered in tight, stubborn strips and left the paint's surface duller rather than clearer. She frowned, measuring the change with the practiced calm of a person whose work thrived on minor catastrophes. The studio outside remained ordinary. A kettle hissed in the apartment above. A dog barked twice, then subsided. The city insisted on its trivialities while she listened for the places where the surface refused to be simple.