“Wait, what did they do?” Clara was leaning toward me, eyes wide. I hadn’t told anyone the full story. My friends in New York only knew what they’d heard passed along the gossip lines, or whatever they read in the blogs, but I had ignored the concerned texts, the querying emails disguised as support. Like my old clothes, the people I used to spend time with—other artists, other gallery girls—seemed to belong to a staged, unfamiliar version of my life.

I grasped for a starting point, an origin, but I really didn’t know where everything had begun. I had tried to patch together the story all summer, but there was so much I had refused to see.

I described for Clara the time Ramona met me for lunch at Union Square Cafe, me brandishing my corporate card like a proud child. The night she invited me to her apartment to look at her work in progress, how sorry I felt for her, in the cramped little Lower East Side tenement apartment she shared with three other girls. Before I knew it, I was telling her she should use a spare room in Matthew’s studio. I knew Matthew would be angry that I’d extended the use of his space, but he never worked in the mornings, and that’s when Ramona liked the light the best. In my mind, they would never cross paths, never even meet.

“So wait, why did they?” The gin and tonics I was drinking seemed to have materialized from nowhere, and before I knew it I was rattling the ice cubes at the bottom of my empty glass again. I hadn’t eaten much at the caf, and I had quickly reached the open, hyper-confessional stage of drunkenness, when the person across from you morphs into some idealized receptacle for your stories: the most sympathetic person you know, the most genuine, the most worthy of your secrets, your trust. All of a sudden I was burning to tell.

“That’s what I don’t know!” I slammed my hand on the bar, and the man next to me turned to look at us. I lowered my voice. “I knew something weird was going on. Ramona and I had met up again to talk about her work, and I was talking about Matthew and she just had this look on her face, like she couldn’t even keep back how much she disliked him. So I asked her, and she said he seemed entitled. Arrogant. Which, yeah, he was. Is. He is.”

“I don’t understand,” Clara said.