And then he capitulated, sliced it, sheared it, and they both watched the locks fall silently to the floor. And she cried when she saw herself in the mirror, for she did not know herself anymore, and he looked at her in horror.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought it was what you wanted.”

“It is,” she said. “It was.”

“OK, Lissa.” The teacher comes over to her. “So, now we’re going to do a longer pose.”

“I know.”

“So, just make sure it’s something simple—something you can hold for forty-five minutes.”

She sits down on the raised platform, still in her kimono, and finds a pose, one knee up, the other leg bent beside her. She clasps her knee in her arms to brace against. She has a small repertoire of longer poses. There are some people who can sit for hours in the most contorted of positions—dancers usually, acrobats. She is not one of them.

After a few minutes the room settles down. They are painting now—there is the sound of brush on canvas, the teacher’s footsteps as he moves quietly from easel to easel. Sometimes he says nothing, sometimes he leans in—Good, he murmurs, or See this—the line here? He traces his hand on the paper, lifts it, moves it through the air.

She looks down at herself—her lower legs, the stubbled hair that she forgot to shave this morning. The heat in here is patchy—part of her lower calf is turning mottled and red. She can smell the scent of herself.

She is aware that she has lost much, so much that she cannot quite comprehend its scale: She has lost Nathan, she has lost Hannah. She has lost Cate, who will not return her calls.

But she has lost much more than that, as though loss were a black hole, pulling all the potential futures, all the things you might have been, all the successes, the loves, the children, the self-respect you might have had, down into it.

“We want to capture something,” the teacher is saying. “Some essence. It is not our job to interpret. We want to transmit.”

Her left buttock is already growing numb. There are pins and needles starting in her foot. She shifts slightly, hears a tut-tut from the teacher.

“Lissa,” he says. “Please try to keep still.”

There is a cough, and she looks up into the eyes of a young woman. She is twenty or so. Beautiful in a precise way. She looks like a serious little doll.

She imagines the young woman’s body beneath her clothes, smooth like alabaster. What does she think when she looks at her?

Does she think of why she is doing this job still, at her age?

Does she look at the curve of her belly? Does she wonder if she has had children?