I ignored him. “Does everybody have keys to this place?” I snapped. “Give it to me.”

He looked alarmed but rolled it off the ring and set it on the hook next to the door. “It’s my property, so yes, I have keys, but no, no one else has keys to this studio,” he said flatly.

“Max has keys,” I said.

“Max is not supposed to have keys,” he said, putting his head in one hand and closing his eyes. “That’s not good.”

“Max knows everything and I’m not even allowed to say Carey’s name,” I told him, saying what I shouldn’t have said, the anger in my voice so sharp that Tyler flinched.

“Max does not know everything,” he said. “I—look. I am not trying to keep secrets from you. I—we are sorting something out, delicately, and it’s not my place to discuss it.”

“It is crazy to keep such a wall between me and them. You don’t talk about any part of your Pine City life. You have these big ‘we’ statements and then, like, I don’t know, change the subject. And what’s worse is you don’t want me to know.”

“What exactly do you want to know?”

“Seriously? Everything. I want you to tell me about yourself.”

“Be specific.” He was daring me to ask something, but I couldn’t tell what it was.

“Okay, for starters, my hand was in Carey’s show, and I tell you about it, and I know you were there, I mean—you looked horrified. But most people would be interested that we, you and I, shared something like that. And I want to know the hows of it. The whys of it. It’s—it’s our shared creative life. But you close up like nothing matters between us at all.”

“I—I know,” he stammered. “I know it. You’re right.”

“And—then—the other thing—is that she’s everywhere here.” I waved my fingers in the air. “She’s in everything—the artwork, the missing photographs, every part of Max’s house. And—she mattered to me. Haven’t you figured that out? It is so…it is SO lonely to be me. You don’t understand. You make this work that…it has a brain. It’s experimental. It’s ideological. My work, like her work—it only has heart. She was an unsophisticated girl from a bad family and so am I. You will never understand what it means to be a young woman in this business. Or to be—someone who makes things all the time and they don’t even know why and they can’t stop. She did that too. And so, what I am trying to say, is that she is someone that I need. I need footsteps, Tyler. I need to know how she did it.”

“She didn’t.” He said this very firmly.