That Antibes beach photo and I had a long history. I’d once had it posted on my wall at college. I’d hung it in honor of a mentor whom I’d loved desperately, and without return.

Teague had been my TA. At the ancient age of twenty-five, he had presided over my discussion section for a European art history class. A tense, short, muscular guy with red hair and a flat gaze, Teague had been prone to wearing the same jeans and ratty canvas sneakers daily, while his shirts shifted radically between obscure heavy metal bands and uniforms from the many blue-collar jobs he’d worked. His voice was low, rich, and emphatic. When I closed my eyes to think about him at night, I never saw Teague; instead, his voice came to me, its mutters and rejoinders, the way it goaded me to think harder, think harder.

There’s more here, Maggie. Whenever Teague said those words, I felt the sharp prick of my own insufficiency. Naturally I wrote my paper on Françoise Gilot. Teague praised it warmly. In our last class, I told him I was thinking of getting an art history degree, maybe specializing in postwar Paris.

“Why?” Teague said. “What are you, Maggie, a freshman?”

I nodded, stung by the scorn in his deep, brutal voice.

He scrunched his nose and sighed. “Gilot isn’t an end. She’s a means. She’s a reason to engage in your world. This world. Here. Right now. Don’t lock yourself away for her sake.”

It hadn’t occurred to me then that Teague had been probably talking himself out of his PhD, and soon another blue-collar T-shirt would be added to his rotating collection. At the time, I’d merely assumed he’d seen through my transparent attempt to appeal to him. I’d thrown the Gilot essay in a drawer and ripped down the photo, never to think about them again until a couple of weeks ago, when Kaye had brought up the actress and her new role.

Sitting there, holding Gilot’s smiling, tilted face, my own young, raw longings came flooding back. I had loved her book and her work, but I had listened to Teague’s advice. I’d studied journalism. I’d paid attention to this world. My world. It had led me to Jay Eastman, his book on the drug trade in Vermont, and then the murder of Nikki Bolio, and a lot of running away, until I entwined myself in Kim Lord’s case last spring so deeply that I almost didn’t get out. The one thing I should avoid now was studying another woman’s death. I knew that. I knew it like I knew the sound of my own name.