The phone felt small in my hand. There it was, the note I was looking for. Not forgiveness. Not pity. Layla’s truth. She had never astonished or dazzled her father, not in the way Erik or Brenae had, not in the way she wanted to. He didn’t believe in her talent, had never hungered for it to prove itself. But then one day Layla herself, as a young girl in the arms of another knowing and powerful older man—had become an artwork of his making, desired by him, shaped and defined by him. How could she let that go?

I thanked her and hung up. Two men drifted into the room, gazing at the photos, but too fast. Seeing and not looking. “Steve Goetz’s daughter,” commented one. “They’re letting her graduate.”

“What happened with her again?” said the other.

I listened to them diminish Layla to a crude item of gossip before I realized Ray was still on the line, waiting for me.

“Did you get the answers you wanted?” he said in my ear as I joined the flow of traffic into the next wing of the studios.

“I don’t know,” I said. “But I have nothing more to ask her.”

“You tell me how it all goes,” said Ray, his voice softer and more distant. “Or maybe one day, I’ll listen to it on your show.”

“That could be a long time yet,” I said, struggling to sound hopeful.

“I’ll wait,” he said. “Good night, Maggie.”

BRENAE’S STUDIO WAS AS EMPTY as the day we’d visited. The scuffs on the floor. The fake stars on the ceiling. The pushpin holes in the walls. A sign outside read, IN HONOR OF BRENAE BRASIL, and inside, people pivoted in silence before wandering out again. As I hung back in the hall to watch, I wondered how many of them were thinking not of Brenae’s art, but of her death, here, in this very space. Putting the gun to her mouth and pulling the trigger. To know these walls as the walls that had absorbed the sound of the shot—this floor as the floor where the mattress lay, her corpse upon it—was to see a still chamber of death amid the life and creative force of the rest of the campus.

It was also to hear a silence. A silenced voice.