I opened the door to Grandpa’s office and went in, turning on the light. The built-in desk was still covered with stacks of papers, and the project that Joan had been working on was still covered by a canvas at the end of the room. When I had come up here to find a picture for the memorial, I’d been focused on the wall of photos, but now I noticed several shoe boxes full of paper cubes on the counter. I stuck the picture of my grandparents back on the wall and went to look more closely at the cubes. They were about a half-inch square, and there were letters and numbers on them, sometimes typed and sometimes handwritten. I recognized Grandpa’s handwriting. Joan had made these cubes from his notes.

I looked over at the canvas-covered form. While Joan was alive, I would never have peeked, but someone was going to see this sooner or later. I crossed the room and carefully pulled off the canvas. Beneath it was a sculpture made of hundreds of those paper cubes. It was shaped like a head.

Downstairs I heard Dad and Analemma return. “Aria?”

“Up here,” I called.

The structure of the sculpture was so intricate, each cube fitted precisely into the ones around it. In one area, a math equation in Grandpa’s handwriting had been constructed across several cubes.

Dad and Analemma came upstairs and into Grandpa’s office, and Dad paused in the doorway.

“I think it’s a statue,” I said.

Dawning comprehension came over his face. “It’s my father. Come over here—you can see it better.”

I went to stand by him, and with more distance, the tiny paper cubes became part of a whole. I had been too close to see it clearly. Now I recognized Grandpa in profile: his high forehead, his prominent nose, even the shape of his hair.

“She wasn’t finished,” Dad said. “The back of his head isn’t done.”

He was right. It looked as if Joan had gotten about three-quarters of the way through the project, and the lower back portion of Grandpa’s head was missing.

“It’s over there,” I said, gesturing to the boxes of cubes. “That’s the rest of him.”

Dad picked up a cube and examined it. “I wonder if she was going to paint the sculpture, too.”

“It would cover the handwriting. So probably not, right?”

He went to the sculpture and turned it to face us. From this angle, you couldn’t see the missing portion of Grandpa’s head.