“Thank you.” She squeezed Noelle’s hand back. “I submitted the paintings under the name Mimi Roz, after Cole’s nickname for me and my mom’s maiden name. I thought if I didn’t tie it too closely back to my father, he couldn’t be too angry with me, and maybe he wouldn’t interfere.” She kept her eyes unfocused. Noelle brought their grasped hands up to her lips.

“Maybe he wouldn’t have, either, if I hadn’t gotten such good press. The show got written up in the Times, with pictures of me and my paintings. There were interested buyers for every piece. We sold a couple to collectors. And then, suddenly, they were all bought, by one ‘very generous patron,’ the gallery owner put it.”

She paused to acknowledge Noelle’s sharp intake of breath.

“We went out to our house on Cape Cod for a weekend, and my father was terrifying. Jovial, almost gleeful. He opened a bottle of wine, built a bonfire, served lobster. And then, he started talking. Not yelling. He was calm, almost pleasant.”

She’d started shaking. Noelle rubbed her thumb in circles over Miriam’s shoulder.

“He explained that he’d been telling his friends for years about his brilliant daughter who was going to come join him in business as soon as she graduated. He said that he couldn’t simply have me run off to paint silly fairy-tale paintings and play boho. What would it look like to his business associates? They would all judge him if his own daughter didn’t want to come work with him. It would make a fool out of him.”

She breathed in, sucking air into her lungs like she was drowning.

“I can still hear him in my head. I’ve been hearing him, every day for ten years. I could see, couldn’t I, why I couldn’t be allowed to continue this delusion I had of choice. I wasn’t even talented. I wasn’t even using the name he’d so graciously given me. It looked like I wanted to distance myself from him.”

“Miriam,” Noelle asked, sounding sick, “what did he do?”

“He took the paintings out, one by one,” Miriam said. “He’d bought all of them, except for the two we’d already sold. He fed them all into the bonfire. I should have stopped him, I know, but I was frozen. I thought, if I lunge at him, he’ll just throw me in the fire, too.” Tears streamed down her face, and she swiped at them.

“So I sobbed, and I begged him to stop. And he laughed, and they kept burning.”