I left my e-mail account and began researching “art restoration,” quickly learning that I was in even more trouble than I’d thought. I had absolutely no business going near that mural. Restoration was no job for a novice, let alone for one person. Page after page on the restoration sites showed groups of people wearing protective gear as they worked together on a mural. Was Jesse Williams setting me up for failure for some unknown reason? Or maybe this was his approach to dealing with the kids he tried to save. Maybe he set each of them up with an impossible task and then goaded them to complete it to boost their self-esteem. Again I wondered if he had the wrong Morgan Christopher. I Googled my name on the computer, not for the first time of course, but this time I added the word “artist” to my search. Mine was the only name that showed up. It was on Instagram, my old preprison account, when I still looked fresh faced and innocent, rather than the haunted-looking girl I saw in the mirror these days. Staring at my Instagram page, I felt myself caving. Tentatively, knowing how much it was going to hurt, I clicked on a picture of myself with my parents. I’d posted it a few years ago, why I wasn’t sure. Maybe I’d wanted to pretend I had a normal life. A normal family. We’d been at the state fair, and to an outsider, we probably looked like a handsome threesome. Nice-looking father. Attractive, golden-haired mother. Blond daughter, pretty despite wearing no makeup. No one could tell the warped history of the family from this photograph, or that a short time later, the pretty daughter would be locked up. Now I saw the picture differently and it startled me. The three of us stood in front of the Ferris wheel. My father had his arm around my mother. Although it was morning, I knew he was already hammered. I could tell by the sloppy grin, by the way his hand grazed my mother’s breast. My mother was probably three sheets to the wind herself, her prescription sunglasses askew. They didn’t look like lowlifes, my parents. They’d both somehow managed to hang on to their computer programming jobs. High-functioning alcoholics. I’d learned that term in AA. I hated the way my very presence in the photograph seemed to give them credibility. Made them look like worthy parents. “You were a mistake,” my mother told me once when she was blotto. “We never wanted to have kids.” That had already been pretty clear to me. They’d never been there for me.

This ruminating was doing me no good.