She couldn’t even be sure if what he looked like in her mind would match up to reality. Every time they’d been together, she’d been buzzing with distraction. They’d had sex in the dark after a lot of wine. And in the last moments there was the moon, for all the help it was to see clearly by, and patches of streetlight along the weedy lot. But the darkness had swallowed most of the detail of that night. The last she’d seen of him, she was sure she was dying.

She knew sharply what she’d felt toward him in that moment, but the specific features of his face wavered uncertainly in the memory. Marcelline had this recurring horrible fantasy that she might have walked right past him on the street between then and now and not even noticed. In her ugly daydream, he turned as she went by and smiled at her blindness.

She needed to see him because she needed to know how she’d handle it. She was afraid of what it would do to her to know, to recognize—not just remember and guess—what he looked like. She was desperate to put a face, the right one, on this thing.

Or so she said. So she thought. But instead, here she was in the library with Carly and Ada for the fourth day in a row.

“It seems like cheating,” Carly said. “I’m just copying what these great famous artists did. That’s not very right, is it?”

The table was covered with art books opened to iconic paintings: Starry Night, Girl with a Pearl Earring, Guernica, A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, Water Lilies. In front of her was Michelangelo’s The Creation of Adam. Carly peered up from her paper every few strokes, checking it against the zoomed-in detail of the famous fresco.

Her sketch pads and pens, two full rainbows of colored pencils, and a set each of oil pastels and charcoals took up the rest of the tabletop. Ada had brought along a mandala coloring book and a big box of crayons that Carly had frequently borrowed from during the lesson. But Ada had left off the coloring and was flipping though an art book that covered most of her lap.

Marcelline looked up from her own book that she’d been hiding behind to think. “I’m not suggesting you sign your name to it and try to pass it off as your own idea. It’s just an exercise. Brain training. You look at it and try to decide what medium and technique you’d use to get something like that effect. You guess at how to duplicate the strokes you see, or think you see. You make the leap and find out how close you were to right. All it costs is paper and time.