She takes her bag and walks down the hallway to the women’s restrooms. There are high shelves on either side, the smell of paint and clay and turpentine. She locks herself in one of the stalls and takes off her jacket and her T-shirt and her bra, her jeans and her knickers. She folds her clothes and puts them back in her bag, then puts on her kimono, keeping on her socks, as the floor is chilly. She pees quickly. The last thing she wants is to need to pee before the first break. The first break is not for forty-five minutes.

She makes her way back down the hallway, pushes open the heavy door of the studio. The students are here already, busy preparing their easels. A thin, clear light falls from high windows. She makes her way over to a raised platform in the middle of the room.

“OK, Lisa,” says the teacher.

“Lissa,” says Lissa.

“Right, Lissa. So—when you’re ready, just take whatever pose you like. We’ll do some short ten-minute sketches, and then move on to the longer poses later in the morning.”

Her toes are already cold, but there are a couple of heaters, which are on. She slips out of her kimono and sits down.

The teacher looks at her for a moment, then: “Actually—what if we begin by standing?”

She stands, finds a pose, one foot in front of the other, arms behind her back.

“Right,” says the teacher to his students. “Charcoal or pencil. Ten minutes. Let’s go.”

There is the scribble of charcoal and pencil on paper.

So, thinks Lissa, here she is again.

She has managed to eke out her savings from Vanya by living on soup mix and porridge, rarely going out, spending her days watching old films on her computer, feeding her melancholy, and now she is down to the last two hundred pounds in her account.

She always thinks that somehow she won’t be back here. She’s always wrong.

For a long time she waited, bracing herself for Hannah’s fury, but when weeks had passed and she heard nothing, she wrote her a single message—I’m sorry. I’m here if you ever want to talk. It was weak at best, craven at worst.

Nothing from Nathan. Not since New Year’s Day. Not since the scene in her flat. She wrote him a letter, then burned it. Wrote him another, then burned that too.

During the break she goes out to use the bathroom, and on the way back she casts a look at some of the students’ sketches. Her haunches. The rise of her breasts. The shortness of her hair.

In the early spring, she took herself to the hairdresser and told him to cut her hair. He approached her warily.

“An inch?” he asked.

“More,” she said. He cut off two. “More,” she said.