Anne smiled at him. It was a very conscious decision, and you could see her eyes smile right before she moved her mouth. Whatever expressions were on Anne's face, she put there--other than the shadows of fatigue. "Well. It's you."
And it was.
As she said, the backing was bleached wood, and rather than being white, it was a very, very pale butter yellow. The package smelled like wood and sharp permanent professional paper glue. At first, Anne's Project only looked like so many uneven pinpricks of color-- dotted with incredible precision and care to create a work that was not unlike Klimt's, if he worked in anything but oil. Anne took hold of the other edge of the paper and pulled it aside with a last, long tearing crackle. All the tiny paper bits resolved themselves into an image. It didn't have the precision of a computer-assembled program, but no computer would be able to duplicate the textures that made up the long face and the shoulders in half profile. It was Trenton, of course, but in the painting he had a very odd, very slight smile, almost of absent-minded relief or good will at whatever he was looking at just off in the distance. The shoulder was bare, though it had Trenton's sharp lines, it was without the inked patterns he had put there himself; his face was also sharp, in the way of his features, but his eyes were both dark and simultaneously sympathetic.
The painting was an ideal, an ideal that no doubt Anne saw when she looked at him, as she did now, with a small smile of her own.