She registered him peripherally: tall, dark jacket, the slight forward lean of someone who was genuinely looking rather than performing looking. Reading glasses in his hand, folded and unfolded once. He stood about a meter to her right and studied the painting in silence.
She went back to her own thoughts.
Thirty seconds passed.
"I don't think it's unfinished," he said.
He wasn't speaking to her, exactly. Or he was, but in the way people sometimes speak in galleries — out into the room, toward the painting, a thought that had become too large to stay internal.
Sofia turned her head. He was still looking at the canvas. Late forties, maybe — no, early forties, the grey was early. Sharp face, tired in a specific way she associated with people who spent their days making decisions.
"It isn't," she said.
He looked at her then. A pause — brief, assessing, not unfriendly. "We agree."
"We might," she said. "What do you think it is?"
"Something that chose to stop," he said. "Not something that ran out."
She looked back at the painting. The diagonal — that long pale gesture across the dark. "I think that's still wrong," she said.
He turned toward her more fully now, a degree of attention she noted. "How so?"
"Stopping implies a decision made by the thing moving," Sofia said. "But this—" she gestured toward the canvas, "— this isn't about the thing moving. It's about the distance. The gap at the end. The painting isn't about the crossing. It's about what the crossing doesn't reach."
He looked at the painting. Looked at her. Back at the painting.
"That's a bleaker reading," he said.
"Yes," she said.
"You think that's what she meant?"
"I think what she meant is less interesting than what she made," Sofia said. "They're not always the same thing."
A short silence. He unfolded his glasses, looked at them, folded them again. "I'm Luka," he said.
"Sofia."
He looked at the painting. "I still think I'm right."
"I know," she said. "You're not."
He smiled — not a large smile, but a real one. The kind that arrives without being managed.