So she came that night to sit alone in her upstairs office. The gallery closed, dark, quiet below. She swiveling idly in her black chair, only the lamp on her rolltop burning. The electric clock at the corner of the blotter told off the last quarter hour before eight. And, having decided on eight, Sophia waited, nervous now, impatient for the time to pass. She tapped her fingernail twice on the blotter’s leatherette border. Twice quickly, then twice again. Tick-tick, tick-tick.

She glanced out through the open door, out to where the lamplight died, to where the upper balcony curved along the wall into dusky nothing. She imagined her body hanging there. Hanging, turning. The paintings hanging on the wall above it: the moonstruck mountains, the cryptic glades, the seductive ruins in the grass. The body turned and turned and turned towards her and she imagined its face. The same face that had smiled up at her from the ashtray that morning, that had curled and blackened and crumbled away.

“Your mother cared very deeply about the suffering of others,” her father had told her once. “Too deeply, I sometimes thought. She wanted the world to be better than it is. She took on too much of the guilt of things: injustice, poverty and so on. We can only go by our own lights, after all, cover our own patch, you know. We can’t solve the troubles of the universe, can we?”

And no, Sophia had answered, we can’t. And yet, one did just wonder. If things might have been different. She tapped the blotter with one hand. The other moved slowly across her middle. That face, her mother’s face, was so charitable and concerned and responsive and yet so like her own, that one did just think that she, Sophia, might have been more like that herself. Had her mother lived, that is. Had she been around to teach Sophia the trick of it.

This thought only deepened her depression and loneliness, the black well of them inside her. And anyway, it was minutes to eight. She rose, switched off the lamp. Her navy overcoat hung on a stand by the door. She drew the belt from its loops even as she stepped out onto the balcony.