I first saw Clara May's mural on a Tuesday in November, when the wind coming off the East River was sharp enough to make your eyes water and you could see your breath in the portion of the sky that was visible between the buildings.

I was driving to a board meeting at our Midtown offices. I had twelve minutes before I needed to be there. The meeting was about Series B funding and I was thinking about valuation multiples and term sheet structures and whether Arthur was going to push for a lower price again. I always push for a lower price. It's what I do. I'm the cautious one. Arthur is the one who signs the checks. I'm the one who makes sure the checks don't bounce.

The mural stopped me. Not gradually—not like a light dimming, but all at once, like someone had flipped a switch. I actually pulled the car onto the shoulder of Randall's Island Highway and got out and stood there for forty minutes, my coffee going cold in my hand, looking at a woman made of gears and flowers and broken clock parts painted on the side of an abandoned warehouse, thirty feet tall, and in the center of her chest, where a heart would be if she were human, was a single gear turning.

I called Arthur. "You need to come see this. Now."

He arrived in eighteen minutes. He stood next to me for three minutes without speaking. Then he said: "Find her."

That's how Clara entered our lives. Not as a person, not initially, but as a finding. Like a car. Like an apartment. Like an investment.

Her name is Clara May. She is twenty-six years old. She has dark hair that she wears in a knot at the back of her neck that is always slightly wrong, as though she tied it with one hand while looking at something else. She is tall—taller than most women, taller than me, which is notable because I am not a short man. She has a face that stops people on the street. I have watched this happen. People walk past a building with her mural on it and they stop walking. They look up. They stand there. Some of them cry. I don't know why they cry. I have asked her. She said: "I don't know why I paint it."

Arthur rented her a studio in the Hudson-Hale building on 23rd Street. A proper studio—north-facing light, running water, a kitchenette, a window that looks at the Empire State Building on clear days. Clara moved in on a Friday. I was there to help her carry boxes. She has seven boxes of art supplies: canvases, brushes, tubes of paint, sketchpads, a set of charcoal sticks that she treats with a reverence I have only ever seen directed at musical instruments.

"You don't have to help," she said.

"I know," I said. "I want to."

She looked at me the way people look at you when they are trying to decide if you are being sincere or performative. I let her look. I have been looking at her for eleven years. I am good at being looked at.

The first thing I noticed after she moved into the studio was that she paints at night. Not metaphorically—literally. The studio has no curfew, and she comes in after dark, sometimes after midnight, and paints until 3 or 4 AM. I know this because I sometimes drive past the building at those hours on my way home from the office, and her window is the only one in the entire building that is lit. The Empire State Building is visible through that window, and on clear nights I imagine she paints it too, though I have never seen her work that includes it. She hasn't shown me anything new since the mural. She shows me the mural sometimes—she'll pull out her phone and say, "Remember this?" and I will look at the photograph and say, "Yes," and I will remember, and it will feel like remembering something that happened to me, which it did, in the sense that I was the one who stopped the car and made the call and brought Arthur to the warehouse. But it is her memory, not mine. I am a secondary observer in my own story.

The board meeting that day went poorly. Sterling's company—Sterling Capital, led by a man named Richard Sterling who has the kind of face that looks honest in photographs but not in person—was making moves against us. They had been quietly acquiring small stakes in our portfolio companies and consolidating them into a holding vehicle. By spring, if the reports I had on my desk were accurate, they would have enough voting power to nominate a majority of our board. Arthur was calm about it. He is always calm about things he cannot control. "We'll deal with it," he said. "We always do."

But that night, driving past the Hudson-Hale building, I saw her light again. Clara, at her canvas. The gear in the woman's chest, turning. I pulled over. I sat in my car for twenty minutes, watching that window, and I thought: if Richard Sterling takes the company, if Arthur loses control of everything he has built, if the stock drops and the board changes and the narrative shifts from "visionary leadership" to "failed expansion"—Clara's light will still be on. She will still be painting. She will still be the person who stopped strangers on the sidewalk and made them cry without knowing she was doing it. And I will still be the person who called Arthur and said, "You need to come see this."

The gear turns. I watch. That is all I do. That has always been all I do.