So at first I saw Mary Sabon as only another potential buyer. Besides, from Duncan’s feverish descriptions, I would have expected someone taller, wiser, more voluptuous. She was short but not slight, her frame neither fat nor thin, and from her shiny red hair to her custom-made emerald-green shoes, from the scent of perfume to the muted red dress that hung so naturally off her shoulders, she radiated a sense of wealth and health. (She dressed up for you, Janice, in her Truffidian Cathedral best.)

She nodded to me as she came in and wandered from wall to wall, glancing at the paintings with nervous little turns of her head. Her hands, held behind her back, clutched a purse. She had not yet attained the artful guile of poise and positioning that would someday make her the center of attention. The necklace had not yet begun to form.

“Can I help you?” I asked, half rising from my desk. I remember wondering if I might interest her in one of the pathetic landscapes that had come to fill my walls—indeed, whether the listed prices were high enough to match her wealth. I had, at that time, some masticated and mauled views of Voss Bender Memorial Post Office—popular since Lake’s success—as well as some nicely watered-down panoramas of the docks and the River Moth. All made respectable by the nearby presence and divine quality of two Lake sketches of fishermen cutting apart the carcass of a freshwater squid.

She turned to face me, smiled, and said, “I’m Mary Sabon.” Despite her nerves, she carried herself with an assurance I have never had. It rattled me.

“Mary Sabon,” I said.

She nodded, looked down at her shoes, then up at me again. “And you, of course, are Janice. Your brother has told me a lot about you.” And laughed at her cliché.

“Yes. Yes, I am,” I said, as if surprised to learn my own identity. “So you’re Sabon,” I said.

“Indeed,” she replied, her gaze fixed on me.

I said: “Do you know that what you’re doing could get Duncan fired by the Academy?”

It just came out. I didn’t mean to say it. Ever since the Attempt, I haven’t had any tact. (Ever since? You’ve never had any tact!)

Sabon’s smile disappeared, a look of hurt flashing across her face. In that hurt expression I saw a flicker of something from her past coming back to haunt her. I never found out what it was.

“We love each other, Janice,” she said—and there’s a surprise, a shock. Something unexpected brought to the surface by the clacking of keys against paper: she’s just a girl. When we met that first time, she was just a girl, without guile. I am ashamed of something and I’m not sure what. She was young. I was older. I could have crushed her then, but did not know it. (Dead. It’s all dead. It’s all gone. Senseless.)