Leora tried to think of people she knew, or had known, and tried to remember if she had ever seen them alone. As she ran through various people in her mind, it occurred to her how little she knew about any of them, even her own family. A deep sadness pressed on her, which she tried her best to shake off. “So what am I like when I’m alone?” she asked.

Jake took an audible breath and said, “You’re good at seeing things.”

Leora looked at him, then realized she was looking at him, and laughed, feeling foolish.

“No, I mean it,” he said. “Not everyone has the same kind of senses. Some people have a really good sense of smell. I think you have an excellent sense of sight.”

“I don’t wear glasses,” she shrugged.

“No, I don’t mean looking. I mean seeing. I mean really understanding what you’re looking at.”

She smiled, embarrassed. For a moment she felt glad that she didn’t have a tendency to blush. But then she realized that maybe she did and didn’t know it. After all, she hadn’t seen herself alone very much either. “How could you tell?” she asked.

Jake bit his lip a little, as if trying to decide what to say. “I watched you looking at the paintings in the museum,” he answered. “Most people who go to museums don’t really see the paintings. They read the little descriptions that the museum puts on the walls, and then they look at the paintings as if the paintings are puzzles that they have to solve, where they just have to look for the tricks of where the artist put the paint. But not you. You would read the titles, sure, but then you’d look at the paintings for a long time, staring at them up close, then from far away, then up close again. You looked at them as if you were actually looking at the people and places in the paintings, like they were real. You didn’t look at the paintings—you looked into them. That was obvious about you, even from ten feet away.” He stopped talking for a moment, breathed, spoke again. “My mother was like that. She was the only other person I’ve ever seen look at paintings that way—like she was looking through a window. She was good at seeing things.”

“Was she an artist?” Leora asked, imagining sketchbooks lined up beside the notebooks, filled with doodles.