It was the best moment of Hennessy’s life.

Then there was an audible slam. The front door. Bill Dower, returning from wherever he had gone. Jay leapt up so quickly that her stool clattered on the floor. Her still-wet palette was abandoned on the piano. The elevator door was whirring closed.

Hennessy was alone before she even quite understood what had happened.

She sat in the chilly chair for quite a while, not wanting to move in case her mother returned. After an hour, she pulled up the drop cloth to wrap around herself and wait some more (little ghost!). Finally she let herself shiver and admit Jay wasn’t coming back.

With a little sigh, she padded barefoot across the cold floor to the elevator, but discovered it wouldn’t move without the code, which she didn’t have. She went to the door without a knob instead, but it wouldn’t open. It was locked; the keyhole was empty.

Hennessy was trapped in the studio.

At first she called down very nicely, though she didn’t think either of her parents would hear her over their own raised voices. Then she shouted. She banged.

Finally, she gave up. She waited.

It became night.

Hennessy wiped away her tears and turned on the floor lights, which threw hard, lacy patterns across the floor and walls. She went to see the canvas her mother had worked on all these weeks.

It was awful.

It was the worst painting Hennessy had ever seen her mother do. It was twee and cutesy, a straightforward and boring portrait of a daft, plucky little girl sitting awkwardly on a chair. The eyes weren’t alive. The hands weren’t alive. Hennessy, who’d been working and learning with her own art all this time, was embarrassed for her mother. It was terrible that she wasn’t coming up here for Hennessy and her growling stomach, but it felt even more terrible that anyone would ever see this piece.

Hennessy looked at the canvas for a long time, and then she counted, telling herself that if one of her parents came for her by the count of six hundred, she wouldn’t do it.

Six hundred seconds went by. Eight hundred. One thousand. Hennessy stopped counting.

She searched the drawers by the wall and collected all the paints she wanted. Then she moistened her mother’s oils again on the palette, picked up the brush and began to paint. After a few minutes, she dragged over the full-length mirror from beside the sofa, and she redid the portrait’s gormless face with her actual wary expression. She overpainted the boring shadows in the white shift with subtle colors instead. She shrugged the shoulders of that chilly girl just a little, not quite shivering, but wanting to. At each step, she got up to compare her brushstrokes to the other paintings in the studio. She made the eyes alive. She made the hands alive.