“We love each other, Janice,” Mary said. “Besides, your brother is a historian. He teaches for now, but he’s working on new books … And, besides, I won’t be a student forever.”

I think now of all the things I could have said, gentle or cruel, that might have led away from a marble staircase, a raised hand, a fiery red mark on her cheek.

I sat down behind my desk. “You know he’s sick, don’t you?”

“Sick?” she said. “The skin disease? The fungus? But it disappears. It doesn’t stay long. It isn’t getting worse. It doesn’t bother me.”

But I could tell it did bother her.

“Did he tell you how he got the disease?” I asked.

“Yes. He’s had it since he was a boy, when he went exploring. You know—BDD. It comes and goes. He’s very brave about it.”

Never mind the magnitude of Duncan’s lie; it was the BDD that caught me. All the breath left my body, replaced by an ache. Before Dad Died was something between Duncan, my mother, and me. (And yet here you are, sharing it in a manuscript that might be read by any old drunk off the street.)

“Are you all right?” she asked.

There must have been a pause. There must have been a stoppage, a shift of my attention away from her.

“I’m fine,” I said, leaning back in my chair. “As long as you know about it.”

Yes, the fungus left his skin for weeks, sometimes months, but when it returned, it was always more insidious, more draining of his energy. How could I possibly explain to her about Duncan’s obsession with the underground, especially now that he swore it no longer obsessed him?

She smiled, as if forgiving me for something. The simplicity of that smile charmed me for only a moment. Simplicity, where no simplicity should exist. She would always be complex, complicated, devious, in my mind.

“I want to buy a painting,” she said.

I had a feeling this was her last-ditch effort to make nice. She would buy my friendship.

“A painting,” I echoed as if I were a carpenter, a butcher, a priest, anything but a gallery owner.

“Yes,” she said. “What do you recommend?”

This was a good question. I wanted to recommend that she never see Duncan again. That she leave Duncan alone before she hurt him irrevocably. That she never return to my gallery because … because … Did I say these things? No. I did not. I held my tongue and pointed out the most expensive items in my gallery: the two squid sketches by Lake called, perversely, “Gill” and “Fin.”

She nodded, smiled, looked at them, then looked at me. “They’re very nice. I’ll take them,” she said, and, turning, blanched as she noticed the price.

I let her buy them, although I could see they were too expensive even for her. (She didn’t have much money. You made her spend two months’ allowance on those paintings. I bought them from her afterward so she’d have money to live on.)