By the time I opened the slim black volume, titled Lee Lozano: Dropout Piece, my heart was working overtime. Lozano, who made the paintings I loved, the Wave series—disappeared soon after they were done. Someone had told me once she did it on purpose, the leaving. The book asserted that Lozano had indeed left the art world in 1971 with a performance titled Dropout Piece that ended with her burial in an unmarked grave outside Dallas in 1999. “I will give up my search for identity as a deadend investigation…I want to believe that I have power & complete my own fate,” she wrote in her notebooks.

The title echoed across the empty canyon of my struggling brain: Dropout. Dropout. DROP OUT. That was one of Carey’s three notebooks in the library that I could not identify.

*  *  *

I made it six steps before he said my name. Tyler was in the doorway to our room, pulling on his inside-out t-shirt in the doorway.

“Want to get breakfast?” he asked.

My eyes flicked to the library. “Sure.” I sighed.

As I descended the rest of the steps, Tyler ran his hands over the railing to where it angled into an elbow on the banister. He was lost in a dream. It was the same look as the first night we had dinner in his cabin, when he looked so devastated that I could barely stand it.

“Can we stop at Pine City first?” I asked. “I’d love to brush my teeth and change. And I need to go to the studio right after. I can’t lose today.”

“Tell you what.” He inclined his head to the side. “I’ll make breakfast at home.”

“Are you sure?”

“You’re right. We should both get the day started. We’ll get day drunk in town some other time.”

I changed back into my clothes, and we climbed the stairs to leave. As I reached for the front door, he held out an arm and stopped me.

“Alarm,” he reminded me.

“Oh—right.” I typed Max’s birthday into the keypad, realizing that she hadn’t written it on the note. She didn’t want Tyler to know it. I supposed that made sense, given his conflict with Charlie, but it was nonetheless surprising, given that she had keys to all of Pine City.

Tyler held open the passenger-side door of the station wagon for me, and closed it when I was buckled in. He lit a cigarette, rolling down the window with one hand and driving with the other. He was a good driver, sticking to the middle on those narrow country roads, and as we made our way back to Pine City, my mind wandered back and forth and over the lines in the book on Lozano. Lozano, Lozano. Carey named a project after her. Max was researching her and other artists who had disappeared.