If her mother had died a quick death, Mona might have been able to save the gallery. She loved the storage room in the back where all the paintings and sculptures not currently on display were safely kept-a second private art gallery. She loved the little office off the main gallery that had once been her mother’s but was now hers.

She loved its painted red brick and glass storefront, the ebony-stained hardwood, the red velvet curtains along the walls that made the colors of the canvases pop like balloons. Oh, Mona loved The Red too, their little gallery on Savoy Street. Why her mother loved this place so much Mona might never know. She’d robbed Peter to pay Paul and now Peter was at the door and pounding. Her mother had loved The Red Gallery so very much that her last words to Mona had been, 'Do anything you have to, but save The Red.” And for that reason alone Mona sat at her desk in The Red Gallery long past closing time, adding up numbers again and again in the hopes of finding a misplaced zero somewhere, a zero that would turn assets of fifty thousand dollars into five hundred thousand dollars. She also kept the brick painted crimson and her own brown hair colored candy apple red. Mona never passed on that fiction herself, but she never denied it either. She loved The Red Gallery and thought it deserved the very best origin story. None of that was true, of course, but Mona’s mother had been the sort of woman who valued beauty over truth.

So many people were killed during bloody gangster shootouts, she said, that the place had been nicknamed The Little Red Shooting Gallery. Mona’s mother, however, said the name came from the 1920s when The Red was a speakeasy.

Originally it was called Red’s because a man named Red owned the place and for no other reason. It had always been called The Red Gallery, even before the gallery was red.

The red tiffany book