“Oh,” says Lissa. “It’s just my mum’s.”

“Blimey,” he says with a wink. “Then I’d better behave.”

THE GALLERY IS busy, thronged with faces she has not seen for years. Her mother is surrounded by people. It is a month or so since she has seen her and Sarah has lost weight, but she looks extraordinary—regal in a long red dress. It is she who should be Cleopatra, thinks Lissa, not herself.

The pictures are few; there are no more than seven. In each one the painted area takes up only a third of the canvas, then there is an expanse of white space around it. They are hung without frames, so the effect is of the image being suspended in space. As the eyes adjust to the canvas, objects emerge. In one there is a young girl wearing a cotton dress, half turned away, her face in profile; she is stooping to look at something on the ground, but the ground is not there, has disappeared into blankness beneath her feet. The face is smudged, but Lissa knows it is herself.

In the largest of the canvases, which takes up most of one wall, a smudged line suggests a figure, or a creature, walking on the horizon, thinning to nothingness; it could be the Bolivian salt flats, it could be the surface of the moon. There are few distinguishing features, but Lissa knows the figure is Sarah—her mother with her back turned—walking away.

The canvases are not cheap—between two and five thousand each—but there are already three red dots on the cards tacked to the wall.

“She’ll sell them all at this rate.”

Lissa turns to see Laurie beside her. The older woman threads her arm through Lissa’s. “I think she knew when she started these, don’t you?”

“Knew what?”

“How ill she is.” Laurie gestures at the paintings. “It’s as though everything inessential has fallen away.”

And Lissa feels something falling away from her—the ground, her stomach. She looks down at her hands, which Laurie is squeezing.

“And you, Liss?” Laurie is saying. “How are you? How are you coping with it all?”

“Fine,” Lissa hears herself say softly. “I’m doing fine.”

By the time the gallery owner climbs onto a crate to stand above the crowd and speak, the place is packed. Lissa has walked around the block, decided she will leave—decided she will come back again. She has smoked four cigarettes, drunk four glasses of wine. She has lost Johnny, found him and lost him again. She hangs back as the crowd makes a tight circle around Sarah and the gallery owner, silent while Sarah says a few brief words, but Lissa hardly hears above the hard thrum of her anger, and when the crowd parts, she pushes her way towards her mother and takes her by the arm.

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Tell you what?”