“I do,” I told her. “You can make me feel supported by keeping this to yourself,” I demanded, waving my arm over the room. She zipped her mouth and crossed her heart again, then reached into the canvas tote bag she’d brought with her and pulled out two cans of ice-cold seltzer.

“Want?” she asked, pulling the tab, cracking it open, handing it off to me before I could even reply. I took a long sip and belched ten seconds later, loudly.

Max laughed and we were both suddenly ten years old again. “Let’s have a beer,” she said.

“I can’t drink and work.”

“You cannot possibly do any more work today,” she insisted. “Come on. Let me feed you. It’s the actual least I can do.”

I looked at Chastity from above, at the four greasy eggshell-and-pearl panels scattered with bombs of color, and mentally assembled it.

“Lady…this is done,” she said approvingly, and I knew Max was right. This time, I didn’t feel the need to fight her; I didn’t feel the need to compete with her about my own work. I accepted what she saw, and she climbed up on the ladder, to be certain, and then we both looked at it from the stairs to the loft, then minutes later I’d locked up the studio and was seated in the passenger side of Max’s open-top vintage army jeep, seltzers in our hands. She drove us back to her house, taking the east exit and going left on the main road and left again, counterclockwise around the lake, a route I hadn’t yet taken. It felt quicker than going the other way.

At the end of her driveway she turned down a hidden road to the left of the front door—that plain metal doorway set into the hill—and we careened toward a glass wall that parted just in time. Max pulled into a huge garage and threw the car into park. I ran my fingers over the spotless enameled bodies of the three other vehicles lining the space: one green vintage convertible, one shiny new electric SUV, and a jet-black motorcycle, its edges hard and matte. Max pushed open the nine-foot-high bleached-cedar door into the house and ushered me through it.

“DANNY, make dinner!” Max yelled once we walked in, popping out somewhere on the third floor. I was taken aback at her rudeness. The Max I knew was privileged, sure, but she would never yell at anyone, certainly not her help. I stopped short and looked around for the person she was screaming at, but Max laughed at me.

“I’m talking to the house,” she said, and right on cue the vocal stylings of a smooth California lady robot bubbled from a speaker in the ceiling.

“Duck or pork?” asked the house’s disembodied voice.

“Pork,” she said definitively. “You had the duck already, right? When Charlie made you dinner?”