The night sky crackles softly with pale, distant lightning. She goes to the front of the shop and opens one of the casement windows to watch. Sailor jumps up beside her, paws on the sill. Together they read the strangely tropical wind. A storm is on its way. Warm weather is smashing into what had been a grim cold snap. Cate is working through this night because all that has happened to her in Chicago this week won’t matter in New York: the machinery of the play is in fourth gear and she has to catch up with it. She puts away the notebook and tries to put her energy to the task at hand.

The play now has a title: Blanks, in reference to a terrific quote by the architect Edwin Lutyens, a friend of Vita’s mother. Cate has the quote push-pinned to her corkboard.

The only thing is to know and realize that Vita has got blanks in herself and these blanks are blank. If I find a blank, I get a plank and bridge it and I don’t look down, lest I get vertigo.

Presumably the blanks were the dead spaces in Vita’s empathy, particularly for those she seduced and abandoned. Cataracts occluding her view of the marriages she wrecked along her way. Damage and collateral damage along a potholed country road, a treacherous garden path.

The work Cate is fiddling with tonight is something small and manageable: drawing the front of the newsstand for the train platform.

Outside, the storm has broken free of the clouds and the rain is hammering down. She Googles the font for British train signage, which turns out to be Gill Sans Light. She types:

SEVENOAKS

then inlays a background of a worn, yellow/gray/white to print on sign stock.

A sweep of light brushes across the surface of the drawing table. Tires crunch through gravel. Sailor rushes to the window. Dana. Cate doesn’t even have to look to know. A text hisses from her phone.

like what, you weren’t going to tell me?

The TV interviews. She’s gotten calls all week. At least it saved her the embarrassment of having to tell the story again and again, to find a posture to take around it. And now, she sees through the open window the air shimmering above the radiator, and beyond that Dana sitting on her car hood draped in a clear plastic, disposable rain poncho. Cate can’t think of a snappy response.

Dana lifts the overhang of the plastic hood and peers up at Cate, then puts her head down and they restart the conversation.

are you alone in there?

no

are you counting that dog as company?

fuck you, Cate texts, then goes to open the door.

Sailor gets there before her, poised at the threshold, shuffling his butt on the floor, getting ready. It’s always a good time for company as far as he’s concerned.