From the critics, there was no talk of the work she’d put in to craft the pieces precisely, to put the parts together. She’d torn strips out of the canvases and repurposed them on different canvases. She’d painted in a fury, messy, anxious strokes, and then broken them up in jagged rips and put them back together in precise, specific forms. But there was no talk of that. The focus instead was on the angry mess, the fury and the feeling. Alice’s parents were wealthy, educated; her dad was a banker; she had gone to private schools, then Yale. The reviewer could have googled this, and yet he seemed intent on seeing something elementally persecuted, oppressed in her work. Which, maybe, she thought later—bringing the unsold work back to their apartment from the gallery—probably, there was.

It was shitty, the questions people asked in grad school about the origins of her work, her intentions, how her “background” informed what she did. Her parents had told her from a young age not to pay attention to these questions and these conversations. She was brilliant, pretty, special, privileged, regardless of her skin color. She wished now that they hadn’t lied so much.

Quinn’s up early, cleaning the kitchen and looking out the back window, rinsing the two bowls streaked with grease and Parmesan from the night before. She has to get the presents wrapped. She waits for the coffee grounds to steep in the French press; presses. Years ago, at one of the restaurants where she worked, she was converted to the French press; likes the feel of it even more than she notices the difference in the coffee’s taste: the pouring of the water, the slow, deliberate way the grounds slide down the edges of the glass. Maddie’s door is closed, and she doesn’t check on her for fear of waking her before she gets the wrapping done and the presents rehidden on the shelf in her closet above her sweaters. The shelf is just above the drawer inside a drawer where the three pills still are.