I took a break to brush my teeth and stared at myself in the mirror. My eyes were bloodshot—raw wounds in a pallid face. My hair was limp and laid flat against the bones of my skull. The veins of my skin pulsed below the surface; the edges of me were starting to wear away, to disappear completely. I was a floating bundle of nerves. I wondered if I would survive this, if I was surviving it, if there was another me who had already died somewhere along the way, if I was only half a person, if I wasn’t supposed to be here. I wondered if Carey had stood here, in this spot, facing this mirror, and felt this same way. I reminded myself that she was fine as long as she made sculpture, and that she killed herself when she let go of it. It’s okay to work this hard, I told myself. It’s necessary. If you let go you might float away. It felt for a second like I was flashing in and out of existence, but it was only the flickering of the fluorescent lights above my head.

The declined credit card was troubling. My three credit accounts were set to automatically withdraw the minimum from my checking account every month, so it was either maxed out—a distinct possibility given the interest charges on the approximately thirty-nine thousand dollars I’d spent so far this summer—or I’d failed what would now be a hefty minimum payment. Or both.

There was only one way to pay it off. I went back to work.

By the dawn of the next morning, I was almost done with Temperance, the carmine red of her surface better than before, deeper and sadder, even without the rubies. I took a break to catch a few hours of sleep on the sofa, but before I knew it, it was late afternoon, and someone was banging on the door.

*  *  *

“You cannot hide in here,” Tyler was telling me through the door. “I don’t accept it.”

“Too bad,” I yelled. “I’m not hiding, I’m working. Isn’t that the point of all this? How else am I going to stop being some random painter?”

“That’s not fair,” he said.

“It is completely fair and accurate,” I told him.

“I’m coming in,” he said, and then he was unlocking the door and walking inside. He was wearing a hooded sweatshirt covered in burn holes, and clean black jeans in place of his paint-spattered black chinos, and he had three days’ worth of beard growing over that angle of a jawline. The humidity forced his hair into loose curls, and large purple swipes of exhaustion cut his cheeks. Unmoved, I glared at him from behind a sea of paintings.

“I know you’re upset with me, but I’m worried about you,” he said. “Look at you. You look like an insane person.”