“Mmm,” Phoebe said, leaning in close to study the figure he was working on. How many lawn jockeys had she walked past as a child without giving it a second thought? He’d taken the offensive image of Jocko, the obliging black-skinned, red-lipped, wide-nosed garden ornament, and recast it in various forms: an NFL player, an inmate, a doctor, a president. They all had one arm extended like Jocko, helpfully offering a ring to which you could hitch your horse, but instead they each took a knee. Malcolm had sculpted a realistic face to replace the awful cartoon, somehow catching that moment where an instant’s kindness gives way to profound disappointment.

“You don’t want to talk about it,” Malcolm said, swiveling to face her.

“We can’t afford it. You already have plenty of studio space at OAC.” They’d met when they were teachers together at West Oakland High, but Malcolm had moved on to the faculty at Oakland Art College.

“That closet they got me in? Anyway, it wouldn’t be like it was with him. If we got this studio together. You’re not going to disappear if we work in the same place. It might even be nice.”

They didn’t have to say Ted’s name to know when they were talking about him. She knew what Malcolm thought, that Ted Stabler was just another rich, entitled white guy; that LA was toxic and full of snakes, that it had nearly broken her.

In her exile, she’d been surrounded by a different sort of ambition, the low-key hustle of the visual artist. Malcolm and the other artists in his circle worked long and lonely hours. They invented languages with color. They spoke with their fingertips. They left clues for others to follow and the thanks they received was in the silent shuffling of feet on First Fridays.

Phoebe had seen a way forward in Malcolm’s habits and routines. She’d started to believe she could do this after all, make a movie alone—on her own dime, outside the system. Who cared if Callie and Beth, her coproducer and her DP, were both pregnant and half the crew were students and nobody else could possibly love the film as much as she did? Phoebe would make her film one day at a time. No one could stop her if she relied on herself.