It is—was—a big portrait, and it has split neatly down the middle, so that each side contains one eye, half a nose, half a mouth, half a chin, and so on. It wouldn’t be a difficult repair. If she were careful, the join would hardly show at all.

When she tilts her head to the right, the portrait resembles an angry version of her sister, Freya. The more Stella tilts her head, the more Freya-like and lowering it becomes—which is odd, because her little sister does not usually have an angry face. She moves the painting with her foot and it stops resembling Freya. It looks like the portrait of a mannequin: dead-eyed yet oddly sexual. It looks like me, she thinks. A couple of days ago she thought it a bad portrait, but she can’t tell anymore. It’s seeped too far into her soul—or her soul has seeped into it.

Stella smacks her head back against the wall. The house is unyielding and she’ll have a lumpen bruise on the back of her head by morning—if morning ever comes. She has a hunch that it won’t, though. Not this time. Not for her.

Stella slides the two halves of paper across the floor and lays them on her lap. She doesn’t normally cry. When she’s sad she goes quiet, when she’s angry she shouts; it’s only when she’s frightened that she weeps. Her fingertips nibble away at the picture and tears drip off her chin, and the girl floats apart from herself in tiny bits—an earlobe here, an eyebrow there, a cuff, a dimple, a shadow, a lip, a freckle, a lock of red hair.

“What are you doing?” she whispers to herself. “What the hell are you doing?” But she never slows down or stops. One painting is hardly enough; she could tear the whole collection to bits and never be bored. She’s even forgotten that she’s cold and parched; shaman-like, she has risen above hardship and begun existing for the here and now. Collarbones split between her fingers and fibrous eyeballs fall apart, and she experiences a bliss that she hasn’t known in months.

The trouble with me, Stella tells herself, brushing bits off her knees, the trouble with me is that I can’t control my feelings. I never could and I never will. She can’t understand what came over her this summer. It is as if she’s spent the last few months pretending to be her little sister—eager-to-please, goody-two-shoes, wouldn’t-say-boo-to-a-goose Freya—and that was never going to work, was it?

Poor Freya.