Julia DeLuca

Julia planned to teach painting until a professor told her she was better at listening than creating. She believed it meant she had to choose, so she retrained as a counselor and now guides art students through the crises she once faced alone. She paints in her spare time, unfinished canvases stacked against her apartment walls, a private world no one asks about. Callum, the painter she loved at twenty-four, left for New York without her, and she learned that people take what she offers without wondering what it costs. What she wants now is someone who sees past the warmth to the exhaustion underneath, who asks if she is okay before she has to perform being fine.