It felt good to throw everything out, a new beginning, not just a new day.

I unwrapped the paintings I’d left unfinished weeks ago, leaned them against the wall, then arranged my brushes and tubes of paint. I took time organizing the colors in a spectrum around my palette, the way I had back in art school, earth tones next to yellows next to reds next to purples and blues, larger tubes of black and white on either side. I liked doing something orderly after so much of my life had felt out of control.

I took in the unfinished paintings.

Strong and colorful, filled with promise and an inner logic that helps lift them above ordinary abstractions, so said the New York Times four years ago, the time of my last exhibition. So what had happened to all that promise?

I glanced over at the small canvas I’d propped on the window ledge—Peruggia’s still life of fruit arranged on a red cloth, everything outlined in dark blue-black.

Minutes later, I was hammering nails into the wall, hanging a new blank canvas—I never used an easel—then I squeezed paint onto the palette, filled jars with mineral spirits and medium.

It was hours before I stopped and stood back to see what I’d been doing.

The painting—based on a view of my studio window and beyond—had been created with slabs of heavy paint, an abstraction but also a cityscape if you looked long enough. Ugly and beautiful and unlike anything I had ever made, the paint so thick it would take weeks to dry, edges of forms cut into the pigment with the back of my brush or outlined in inky blue-black.

I stared at the canvas, evaluating it as if someone else had painted it. It was possibly the most honest and compelling artwork I had ever made, an image created entirely of feeling, of being in the moment. For the first time in years, I wanted to keep painting.

More nails in the wall, another blank canvas. This time, I drew directly with the paint, allowing the brush to do what it wanted, to guide my hand. An hour passed, the painting rough and not fully formed but buzzing with life: a nude without a face. I tried to paint the face in several times, each time wiping it out with a rag, leaving a mess of smudged paint above the breasts and neck, though I knew exactly who I had been trying to capture—a woman I’d been unable to capture in real life. A woman I had abandoned—or had she abandoned me?

I dumped my brushes in mineral spirits, changed out of my studio clothes, scrubbed the paint from my hands, the whole time with Alex on my mind. A minute later, I was on my cell phone. Spence. Dalton. Brearley. All upscale Manhattan private schools. None of them had ever heard of Alexandra Greene.

I glanced back at the unfinished nude, and I felt it, that Alex was here, somewhere in the city. I knew it.