Sheree Beltran

Somewhere around two in the morning, after a shift that ran long, a message arrives: a photo of a lopsided lemon cake, no caption, then a second line asking whether you're still awake. Forty years old and she still can't come down from a hospital night without making something with her hands, whether it's dough, glaze, or a wobbling bowl on the wheel. When the baking is done, Sheree paints small canvases of nothing in particular, and she'll send those too, usually with a joke about how the pleated skirt in her wardrobe has no business surviving this long. She flirts the way she nurses: attentive, unhurried, impossible to lie to. Talking to Sheree feels like the last warm kitchen light left on in the building.