Ten minutes later I heard him drive off.

As I collapsed onto the orange sofa—Carey’s sofa—I wondered if this had all happened to her once, if she had slept here with a broken heart, surrounded by the only thing that mattered, that was always there for her: work.

*  *  *

The next morning, I moved with a fury I hadn’t known for years. I was a burning, licking flame that passed over each panel in a focused heat, transforming every scrap of the virtues that had so consumed me for the past two years, passing them once again from my brain to the brush as if some empowered ghost were animating my body.

I had worried that it would be impossible to remake my own work, and yet, now I think, Could it have ever been any other way? Did I believe that a single effort could rip these words out of my body for good? No; it seemed they had only grown back bigger and stronger. This time, I let the palette knife scrape the cavities of my soul right down to the bone.

SOME RANDOM FUCKING PAINTER. I finished Modesty before the day was out. Not only was Modesty identical, but she was better than before—she was lurid and crude and hypersexual. I realize it sounds weird to say that about a pile of paint, but that’s what she was.

Four down; three to go, the final layers. I doubled the concentration of Galkyd, stuffed a towel under the door, and ran the dehumidifiers on high.

I slept on the sofa again, waking with cracked lips and dry skin. Three days left—but I wasn’t ready to call them done. The next task, building the frames, was a labor so complex I hesitated to even think about it. I tried to motivate myself with the knowledge that once I built the frames, a truck would take them away and I would never ever have to see anyone from Pine City ever again. These will sell, and I’ll be flush again, and I won’t buy a house up here, I’ll get a new passport and move to Berlin, or maybe Warsaw, they say that’s the new Berlin, right? Somewhere in the former Eastern Bloc. I would cash my checks and buy all new clothes, start a brand-new life somewhere all over again. I would finally dye my hair a different color, and then I’d be a brand-new person, for real this time.

Yet—my body wanted to stop. It didn’t matter how little time remained. I was very nearly broken.

Yuck, I thought, smelling my armpits, which had spent days sweating through my shirt, recoiling as my stomach howled with emptiness. I don’t have any clothes. I don’t have any food. I need a shower.