WHEN I TOOK the photograph to Miranda that same evening, Eggy was already asleep. I didn’t want the little girl to see the altered picture of her mother, but when I looked into Miranda’s closed, tense face, I realized that I missed the child’s piping voice, her energy, her affection. Miranda opened the pocket doors to the front room and waved me inside. I stepped into the once familiar space, now changed by its new spare furnishings—the large worktable I had seen through the window, bookshelves, a small sofa, and a box of toys. I glanced at the table, hoping to see more drawings, but none were visible. On the wall above the mantel was a large ink drawing, a full-body picture of a younger Eglantine, her soft hair lit from the right so the curls on that side of her face formed a partial nimbus as she looked soberly at the viewer with the intense expression I had come to know, her arms folded across her chest. She was standing in an empty, featureless room, wearing a one-piece bathing suit, and she looked rather grubby. Her bare knees were smudged with dirt, and there were dark spots around her mouth, perhaps from candy. Despite the child’s firm stance on the floor and the grime on her body, the image had an ethereal quality, as if the little girl were indeed an enchanted creature rather than a mere mortal. Was it her expression? Was it the emptiness of the room? Although the picture’s luminosity conveyed a feeling of transcendence, I found it unsentimental, not one of those pictures that turn children into the objects of an adult’s false romantic projections.

“That’s a great drawing,” I said, rather stupidly.

“I did it as an exercise in likeness,” she said. “Sometimes it’s harder to draw a person you’re close to than a stranger.”

“Eggy told me that you’re an artist, not just a graphic designer.”

“Yes,” she said. “I needed to be able to do something practical that I also like.” She looked at me for an instant before she moved her eyes away. “I make money from one. My heart is in the other. You said there was something you had to speak to me about?”

I had noticed Miranda’s conscious, slightly formal diction from the beginning, but her curt tone took me aback. “Yes, another photograph was left outside the door. It’s rather unsettling.”

Miranda rubbed her face with one hand. It was an oddly masculine gesture, I thought, like a man feeling his beard. She sighed. “Let me see it.”

I handed the picture to her. She looked at it for an instant and then put it on the coffee table. She didn’t invite me to sit down.

“You’re being harassed,” I said. “Stalking is something of a professional hazard in my business. A woman who has an office near mine went through it last year. Have you thought of notifying the police?”

“What are they going to do?” she said.