After dinner everyone took cocktails to go for a studio walk. Someone asked if we could go to mine, but before I could answer, Tyler spoke.

“She’s running the dehumidifier. Everything’s sealed for another few days,” Tyler lied, so smoothly, and as he said it I realized that I probably should do that. He winked at me and I smiled gratefully.

We walked up to Marlin’s first, where she gave everyone a small framed print: three stripes of iron-dust ink that looked like the fur of a metal caterpillar. There was even one for me.

“Thank you,” I said.

“Of course,” she said, but before I could say any more, someone was opening a flat file and demanding her attention. For ten minutes, her friends rifled through everything in her studio, oohing and aahing over recent works and reminiscing over older ones.

“I love this one,” Jeanne said. It was an old wheatpaste, brick dust still clinging to the back, peppered with holes and fragile as a ghost. A drawing of Carey.

Marlin looked at it sadly. “Me too,” she said, patting Jeanne’s hand. They hugged briefly, and a tear rolled down Jeanne’s cheek. Jack, meanwhile, had his arm around Tyler’s waist and was pivoting him toward Tom, who was telling an elaborate anecdote about falling down a well. Jes was nowhere to be seen.

Our next stop was Jack’s studio. The former Arts and Crafts pavilion was a soaring, peaked cabin filled to the brim with rolls of fabric, three vintage looms, and a scaffold. A large net was in progress, made from different colors of monofilament—fishing line—and swaths of parachute silk riddled with fabric flowers, woven leaves, yarn-wrapped ceramic objects, and glazed porcelain feathers. It was breathtaking—nearly religious in its delicacy and scope.

Jack swept in, shoving things from side to side, but the rest of us stepped lightly and carefully. When we were on the far side of the net, a waterfall of silk and plastic separating us from the rest of the group, Max clutched my arm and pointed to a little glass globe suspended from a golden coin, suspended so seamlessly within his aesthetic that I hadn’t even noticed it. “That’s exactly like the light Carey made for my house,” she said. I couldn’t tell if she was being derisive or not.

“I think they’re all doing that,” I whispered back. “I think she’s in all of their work.”

“You better watch out,” she said playfully.

Then Tyler’s arm brushed my waist, and my focus shifted so ardently that I have no idea what Max said after that.

Before our next stop, we fixed a fresh batch of drinks. Tyler caught my eye while I was mid-conversation with David Bird.

“You have to follow the work,” David was saying. “The work is the only thing that tells you who to be.”