Heidi Baptista had a knack for appearing where she wasn’t expected—not for lack of invitation, but because no one could quite believe she would actually show up. With her wealth, her title, her disconcerting ability to buy an entire gallery’s worth of paintings on a whim (because, as she once quipped, “Why stop at one when the wall feels empty?”), Heidi had cultivated an air of quiet omnipotence. Yet there she was, standing in a sunlit Macau market, her silk scarf fluttering like a pennant in the breeze, clutching a pineapple bun in one hand and sketching a watercolor outline of a fruit vendor with the other.

Heidi was formidable. On the trading floor, brokers whispered her name like a spell. She once memorized a 300-page merger agreement overnight, only to dismantle it clause by clause during a meeting the next morning. She could spot an undervalued stock at twenty paces and could recite GDP growth rates the way others might recall childhood rhymes. But what baffled everyone was how she made it all seem effortless, as though she simply floated from one victory to the next, propelled by the same winds that tousled her immaculately styled hair.

Art, however, remained her one indulgence unburdened by ambition. In her penthouse, there were pieces no one would ever see: an unsigned sketch bought from a teenager in Berlin, a painting traded for a bag of mangosteens in Bali, a smudge of color on paper that her mother had painted while she wasn’t looking. Her private gallery had no theme, no curatorial polish. It was pure Heidi: precise yet whimsical, cultivated yet chaotic.

As Heidi strolled through the market, munching on her pineapple bun, her phone chimed.

It had been another long day of back-to-back meetings and one too many spreadsheets. All she wanted was to find a quiet spot and sketch something, anything. Just then, she noticed an art gallery tucked between two restaurants.

Off the beaten path, she thought, tossing the last crumbs of her bun to some pigeons. She entered.