Chapter One: After the Glasses Come Off

Without glasses, the world had always been made of color and light: a door was a vertical smear of black, a window a diluted square of white, a person a warm shape in motion. But the eye had been impossibly precise—clearer than anything she could see with correction. The clock read 7:12. She had worked past midnight at the Chengchuan Municipal Museum, finishing authentication for the exhibition A Century of Maritime Painting. A migraine, she told herself. An afterimage left by three cups of coffee. In the bathroom mirror, her face was pale, shadows pressed beneath her eyes. She adjusted the frames and noticed that the small print on the wall seemed sharper than yesterday.