HER BIRTHDAY COMES around—she is thirty-six now, playing twenty-seven. She tells no one in the cast. It is freezing, as she leaves the house to visit Sarah, with a fierce, bitter wind. Sarah gives her the usual handmade card, but there is no present this year.

“I’m just rather busy,” Sarah says in the kitchen. “The new work’s consuming me somewhat. Did I tell you? I’ve got an exhibition in the summer. The gallery on Cork Street came through.”

“Can I see?” asks Lissa. “What you’re working on?”

“I’m not sure.” Sarah tilts her head, pondering, then: “No . . . I don’t think so.”

When their coffee is finished, Lissa lingers as her mother gets up. Outside, the wind has died down, and sunlight strikes the winter garden. “Do you fancy a walk?” she says. “It’s brightened up. We could go up on the Heath.”

“Work,” Sarah says, already heading for the stairs. “You’re welcome to stay, but I have to work.”

Lissa stays where she is, listening to her mother’s footsteps climb the stairs.

On the wall of the living room is one of Sarah’s portraits, a picture of herself at the age of eight, or nine. She remembers sitting for it so clearly still: it was summer, and hot in the attic, but she didn’t mind being up there, Saturday morning after Saturday morning in that old flowered chair. She would sit there with her book—her legs flung over the arm of the chair, the sunlight slanting in from the skylight—as Sarah prepared her paints, set up her easel. Then finally, when everything was ready, she would turn on the radio and start to paint, and Lissa would sense it, the concentration, the way she had all of her mother’s attention at last. How safe it made her feel.

Then, one morning, on the pavement outside the school gates, a different sort of painting appeared. Simple white lines, the silhouettes of children drawn in chalk. Everyone standing around, disturbed, as if at a crime scene, wondering what they were.

At home that evening, Lissa told her mother about it and Sarah turned to her.

I painted them. Caro and I. We went out, in the early morning, while you were still asleep. They were all that was left. Of the children. In Hiroshima. We painted them so that people would understand.

She remembers the way Sarah spoke, the pride, the particular smile she had, as though she had done something good. When really, Lissa knew, she had done something terrible. She had no words to tell her mother how those pictures made her feel. The hollowness of those children who had disappeared.