I touched the nearest wall. The wood came away easily, balling up under my fingernail like a wet paper towel. Feeling bold, I climbed the ancient ladder toward the loft, trying to reach a joist, to see if anything in this building was solid. The first step was fine, the second too, but halfway up, a rung fell away beneath me, exposing a cluster of nailheads that ripped a hunk of skin from my calf as I tumbled to the ground.

Blood rushed from my leg and dripped wetly into the hollows of my ankle. Stunned, I watched it run into my sock, over the edge of my sneakers, mixing with the dirt of the floor in a tiny, glossy puddle. My forearm was scraped raw too, blood seeping through the dirt.

I took off my t-shirt, ripped off one sleeve, tied it around the hole in my leg, and looked around the room one last time before I admitted to myself that the whole building would need to be rebuilt. It would take at least six months and a team of workers.

I was doomed.

It was rational to fear loneliness for all those years, I thought as I limped back to my truck: This place, an abandoned hotel turned abandoned retreat, had become in a single afternoon the physical manifestation of my isolation. Yet there was nowhere else for me to go. I had three thousand dollars in checking and forty-six thousand available in credit, money that would barely cover my expenses to remake my paintings, much less pay for shelter or studio space.

There was no plan C.

I sat behind the wheel of my truck for a long time. I thought about renting a storage space and living in it. I thought about squatting in Trenton. I thought about joining Atticus in his shipping container in Corona Park, and about going back to Cady’s sofa. I thought about driving straight through the night and day and night again to Gainesville, the north Florida sinkhole of my birth, to sleep on my mother’s sagging pullout couch, something that I had never considered before—not once, not ever. I thought about quitting.

But when I counted the days—roughly ninety—that I had to remake my paintings, I couldn’t let go. They had to be finished; it was imperative; nothing had ever been more true. There was no plan C because giving up on my paintings was not an available future. Letting go of them felt equivalent to sticking a gun in my mouth and pulling the trigger.

Eventually I drove back to the bungalow and climbed out of the truck. Then I did what anyone in my position would have done: I picked up the cracked plastic brown landline and tattled to the money.

“Isn’t it glorious?” Susan asked right away, after two short rings.