"No one in particular," she said, her voice carefully neutral, returning to rubbing the brush with a cloth. "Just figures to give scale and humanize the structure."
"Mmm-hmm." Barney didn't buy it for a second. His attention returned to the painting, tracing the golden lines. "The style is firm. Confident. Nothing like Lily's sentimental, pastel-colored scribbles. This has... purpose. As if you knew exactly how this building would end up even before laying down the first stroke of scaffolding." He turned completely towards her, and the smile now on his lips wasn't the usual conquering smile, but that of someone who has solved part of a puzzle. "You always know, don't you, Alyx? You see the end of things from the beginning. You know the patterns and their outcomes."
Alyx didn't respond. She just kept cleaning the brush, concentrating on the circular motion of her fingers on the bristles—a ritual to calm her racing heart. Barney was skirting something dangerous that not even Marshall and Lily fully understood.
"Well, never mind," Barney said, shaking off the momentary seriousness and recovering his performative energy. "The point is, you have talent. And it's a talent that could do justice to... this." And he proceeded to unfold his idea with fervor and enthusiasm: he wanted her to paint a portrait of him—but not a simple portrait. A completely nude one. Something heroic, majestic. He wanted to be depicted as what he was—a work for posterity, so his hypothetical children could see and know: "There is Barnabus Stinson. A titan among men."
Alyx listened to him with a mixture of exasperation and amusement.
When he finished, she let out a short, dry laugh. "I promised Lily I wouldn't look at another man naked. And even if I hadn't promised her, Barney, the mere thought of having to study and paint your... 'substitute shame gland'... for hours makes me want an industrial bleach eyewash."
Far from being offended, Barney's eyes shone with renewed challenge. "Ah, a rejection! But everything in life has a price, Alyx. Even those rigid artistic principles of yours." With a fluid motion, he pulled a wad of high-denomination bills from his inner pocket like a magician pulling out a rabbit. "Five thousand dollars."
Alyx didn't even blink. "No."
"Ten?"
"It's not about the money, Barney."
"Then what?" Barney's voice lowered, becoming conspiratorial. He leaned forward, invading her space. "Information? I know you keep secrets, Alyx. Interesting things you don't tell. Maybe I could... help you manage them. Keep them safe. In exchange for a simple portrait. An exchange between professionals."
Alyx's heart skipped a beat so violently she was sure Barney could hear it. How much did he know? Had he connected the dots between her "impossible profits" in trading, her strange knowledge of certain events, and something more sinister? Or was he just fishing in murky waters, as always? Her face, trained in high-stakes poker and hiding internal storms, remained impassive. "I have no secrets to manage, Barney. And I won't paint you. The answer is no. Definitively."
Barney studied her for a long, uncomfortable moment. His eyes scrutinized every micro-expression, every tiny tic. Finally, he shrugged with a theatrical gesture of resignation and put the money away. "Very well. Your loss. But remember my offer. Information, Alyx, is the most valuable currency of all. More than gold. More than art." He turned as if to leave, but his hawk-like gaze, never truly extinguished, swept the room one last time. It stopped on a pile of notebooks and folders on a side table near the balcony. One, in particular, stood out: Lily's old sketchbook, with its brown cardboard cover already worn at the corners. Alyx had taken it out recently, not to immerse herself in pain, but to add small new sketches in the margins of the final pages: the curve of Marshall's nape as he read, the shape of Lily's hand holding a brush. It was a bridge between the diary of hell and the painting of paradise.
Barney, with the speed of a predator, saw it. "Is that Lily's famous sketchbook?" he asked, his tone curiously casual. "The one you filled with sappy drawings after she left." Without asking for permission, without blinking, he reached out and took it.
"Barney, don't," said Alyx, and her voice, for the first time since he had entered, had an edge of steel, a tone that brooked no argument.
Too late. Barney had already opened the sketchbook, but not to the final pages Alyx had filled with confessions and reconciliation sketches. He opened it to the beginning, where the first sketches were innocent studies: Lily's hands, her concentrated profile, her smile captured in soft lines. Then, further on, sketches of Marshall: the breadth of his back, the gesture of his hands when arguing, the expression of absolute concentration when he read. Drawings made with a confident and loving line, but still within the clear, safe boundaries of a deeply rooted friendship.
However, Barney wasn't one to be content with the surface. He kept turning pages, his thumb brushing the paper with an insatiable curiosity. And then he moved past the section of the happy times to another, one Alyx had tried to keep hidden even from her own daily gaze.
A section where the paper seemed more worn, the lines more urgent, the darkness of the charcoal denser.
There, the drawings were no longer from the golden years. They were recent. And they were explicit in their pain.
Barney went still. The constant murmur of his personality, that buzz of energy and arrogance, completely shut off.
The air in the room seemed to thicken. Alyx could see the profile of his face, the line of his jaw tightening slightly. He was seeing the sketches she had made in the deepest part of the abyss. The ones that belonged to no one but her own desperate need to understand, to control, to survive the cataclysm that had shattered her world.
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