I remembered when I first started at the gallery, the clichés that were being bandied around about Matthew Whitehall, the twenty-nine-year-old wunderkind. The rising star. I had been skeptical until I saw one of his newer pieces, a bronze of a couple embracing—there was an athletic quality about the way Matthew had rendered them, something nearly violent, that I found captivating. The articulation of their tendons, the definition of their muscles, the sense of the energy coiled in their limbs, as though they might just as soon launch themselves at one another and collide. I studied the piece until I felt something else—the rubber-band ping of attention directed toward me. I looked to see Matthew across the room, his eyes on my face. The knowing way the corners of his mouth turned up. Now I couldn’t help but wonder if, from that moment, he’d seen me as a pawn.

I wanted to ask Emily more about herself. Did she have a boyfriend? Girlfriend? Maybe that was how she ended up here, too, after her stint in L.A. Maybe she was also retreating, also biding her time at the spa. Though I wondered who wouldn’t be totally devoted to Emily, with her humor and her beauty and her strange, endearing combination of crassness and restraint.

“Ah. You’ll have to tell me more later. Deidre, incoming.” Emily nodded her head in the direction of the front door. I was relieved, for now, to have my attention jerked out of the past. I was still at the point where I could lose hours inventorying every detail for a clue about our end: the first date at the Cuban restaurant in Williamsburg, when Matthew took me home and used the belt of his bathrobe to tie my hands above my head, perhaps testing me for pliability. My first lunch with Ramona, when she ordered a rare burger and I watched the bloody juice run over her hands as she ate.

Deidre gave Emily the rundown for the day, and I found myself looking past them both, through the glass and down the hall. I hated that I was waiting for them, Clara and Des. You are recovering from a broken heart. That meeting them had felt like the first thing that had really happened to me since I had been back. I was watching so intently that it took me a minute to hear Deidre saying my name.

“Lily? Lily. Please tell me how your training is coming along.”