She had to rewarm the sugar over and over. After she finished with Monique, Vivian, and Noemi, Strena stood back and had me turn off the video. She grabbed an old-fashioned camera and snapped a few stills. “What do you think?”

“You made the models look dejected and triumphant at the same time. Downtrodden and victorious. Oppressed and the rulers of all they survey. I don’t know how you did that.”

“I’m exploring the dualities of the human experience. Life isn’t a romantic comedy.”

“Truth. If it was, I would have inherited this house instead of being tasked with cleaning it. The brilliant artist I found in the attic would have been a handsome guy. Of course, Bram would also fall madly in love with me. Obviously, he’d be single.”

Strena flashed me a curious look, then she lifted her camera and snapped a last shot. “Thank you, ladies. You can go ahead and clean up.”

The three models padded off to the bathroom in the back, and I went for the door. “Thank you for allowing me to experience this.” I stopped on the threshold when I remembered that I’d actually meant to talk to Strena about something. “The buyer for the house wants to bring up the settlement to the end of the month. You said you were almost done?”

“End of the month is fine with me.” She pushed her cart back into the corner and wiped her hands on a rag. “Hold on.”

She opened one of the storage cabinets that stood against the wall, and she extricated an old-fashioned brown-striped hatbox from under an avalanche of art supplies.

“I asked Violet if I could have this, and she said yes.” Strena brought the box over. “But you can go through it and make copies for yourself if you’d like.”

I lifted the lid. A trove of faded photographs and newspaper cutouts filled the box to the brim.

“Those are all about her. I want to put together a tribute to Violet’s life.” Strena returned to cleaning her tools. “Once I’m done with my sugarworks series. I’m thinking about something three-dimensional. A theme on how one person can touch many lives. Maybe hang pictures of Violet and articles about her in a certain formation from the gallery ceiling, then hang art from her students on the walls, connecting each piece to her with various colors of thread. And then adding in art created by her students’ students.”

I kept hugging the box, choked up at the sudden gift, at Strena’s words. “A rainbow labyrinth?”

“A network. Like the veins in the human body delivering lifeblood from the heart. Or sap going up from the roots of a tree to a thousand individual leaves. Anyway,” she said, probably uncomfortable with me tearing up. “It’ll be a while before I can start. I’ll let you know when I need the material back.”