His disapproval had hung like a big storm cloud over her head, sapping all her creative energy. After her five-day burst of productivity, it felt like death.

So she’d gone back to bed—the cold, dull weather perfect for such denial—crawled under the covers, and binge-watched the last season of Portrait Artist of The Year, a British television show to which she was addicted. She followed it up with reruns of Antiques Roadshow because some of the art that people brought along was amazing.

Her favorite had been a young woman whose grandmother had recently died and left her a painting she’d bought in a garage sale for ten dollars more than twenty-five years ago. Everybody who’d ever seen the painting had hated it except for the woman and her granny. It turned out to be an early Gainsborough worth several hundred thousand dollars.

Suzanne had almost peed her panties, she’d been so excited.

Glancing down the bed, over her body and the jut of her toes, the paintings of Grady stared back at her. The sum total of her work. Her work. Five lousy paintings. What if this was all she had? What if this feeling she had today persisted, and she only ever had this one week of creative magic?

Suzanne shut her eyes against a wave of emotion that felt very much like loss, which was absurd. How could she mourn something that had only been fleeting?

Dragging the covers over her head, she pulled her knees to her chest and lay in a fetal ball for several minutes. It was cocoon-like but empty, which was how it felt inside her body at the moment—a big black hole, a yawning empty well.

Her cell rang, and Suzanne didn’t even bother emerging from the covers, just groped for the phone on the bedside table and pulled it under the covers with her. She didn’t look at the display as she hit the Answer button. She knew it would be Winona, who’d called several times last night.

“Hello.”

“Suzanne, darling…is that you? Are you sick?”

Suzanne blinked at her mother’s cultured accent, the shock of hearing her voice profound. Her mother had not been impressed about Suzanne up and leaving for Credence. And when her mother was annoyed, she tended to freeze people out for a while.

Displacing the covers, Suzanne sat bolt upright. “Mom?”

“You sound all muffled and stuffy. I told you that you’d catch something going all the way out to eastern Colorado. It blizzards there.”

Suzanne was too speechless to ask bigger questions at the moment. “It blizzards in New York, too, Mom.”

“Yes, but at least there’s a Duane Reade on every corner, darling. Do you have tea? I’ll make sure there’s plenty for when you come home next week.”

There followed a thirty-second monologue on the merits of different kinds of tea, but it took Suzanne only five seconds to zero in on the most salient part of the conversation thus far.

When you come home next week. Yeah…about that…