“I have a great deal of pain. My stomach—my stomach hurts. It makes it hard to eat. And my bones, deep inside somewhere. I mean, not really the bones themselves, it can’t be. It’s just the nerves around them. The whole system is misfiring. That’s all.”

“You couldn’t have gone with him,” Maeve says. “You couldn’t have made the trip the way he wanted you to. Dan, I mean.”

Karo looks at her, misgiving in her eyes.

“On foot? No.”

“Is it wise to live up here at all, then?”

“It’s why I took the job.” She takes a last survey of her half-burned skewer and lays it down on the ashy hearth. “I was diagnosed at forty—that’s early onset, very strange. No one had thought to check for something like this, so I’d been through a terribly dark time. Unexplained pain will do that to you. You begin to look for a way out. But then I started seeing things, people, that weren’t there—that’s when I went back to the doctor. Because of the hallucinations. I thought I was going crazy.” Her features stiffen, and something in her eyes changes, as though she is in a different place, a darker place, just revisiting the memory. “I mean, in a way, that’s exactly it: I was.”

She blinks slowly and takes a breath. “But on the upside, that early diagnosis—it means the drugs work very well. So a job like this, with reasonable hours, downtime, insurance that covers the medication—” She nods to herself, then to Maeve. “You can see that I couldn’t continue painting. Not in any real way, not as my life, my living.” She shifts, pulling up on the blanket, and the movement of her hips makes her wince. “I wish I could say I don’t remember who she was, that Karolina. But I do remember. I still feel her inside me. This was, at least, a way to stay connected to that world,” she says. “Making art is easier when you’re well.”

“Or wealthy,” Maeve says. “Or you don’t have children. Children come with a cost.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

It occurs to Maeve that Karo must feel a certain amount of envy toward the constant parade of working artists who come through the center. More than envy—resentment.

For a moment, she wonders if it could have been Karo who locked Anna out. Anna, famous in her circle, both experimental and political in her way. Almost as quickly, she pushes the idea from her mind: The woman is sick. She’s struggling to toast a hot dog, Maeve.

It couldn’t have been her. In a way, what Karo has done here at the center mirrors Maeve’s own plan. Trapped in a body she doesn’t recognize, she’s chosen to direct others instead.

“How long have the drugs been gone?”

“I took the last dose yesterday. I have a few sleeping pills left—” A sharp intake of breath as Karo reaches down to massage her foot, the arch curving painfully.