After the first two commissions George grew less excited with the work, despite the money, having learned from each one a little more about what he wanted to do next, and having discovered, too, that it was very difficult to compose a portrait of an individual who didn’t interest him. (And it was impossible to compose a portrait of someone he disliked, which had made for a very unpleasant exchange with Donald Trump when George returned his check.)

By 1998 George had limited himself to one commission a year, which in itself provided worlds more money than he knew what to do with, so by this time he had endowed fifty generous Stark Whitely scholarship programs at music schools around the world. The waiting list for a George Botkin musical portrait grew longer every year, and as rumors circulated that he would soon stop writing these portraits altogether, rumors also circulated that large sums of money had changed hands in order for certain people to swap places on the waiting list. It was like a huge joke, mostly, though at times George wished he had never taken that first commission from Turner. He had never even gotten to meet Jane.

“You can do occasional business with the devil without selling him your soul,” Rebecca would remind him whenever he spoke of ending the commissioned work entirely. She cared more about the money than he did, and she was alarmed when he talked this way.

“Kind of,” George would reply.

“It’s important to keep expanding the Whitely scholarships, isn’t it? You don’t have to put your heart and soul into each piece, do you?” Rebecca had asked him the last time they had this conversation. “Can’t you just write something that’s good enough? They wouldn’t know the difference. It’s not as if these pieces get a lot of public play. Or you could recycle some of the material from other pieces that didn’t work out.”

His aggrieved look had been his only reply.

Rebecca made the last two calls necessary to reorganizing her calendar of Friday appointments in the Clinical Genetics Department. As a counselor, she was good at her job, genuinely compassionate yet sufficiently detached to be able to offer patients the information and guidance for which they came to the Yale School of Medicine, one of the best genetic departments in the country. She was still at her desk at the hospital, though her workday was long over and nobody else in the department remained. She had been able to reach most of her scheduled appointments, or had left messages canceling or reassigning patients, and she had managed to catch up to all of her paperwork as well, so her absence would be less problematic, and then came the weekend. Rebecca worried that she might miss Monday, or Tuesday as well, who could say, but of course she couldn’t plan a timetable. Nobody could predict how long it would take for her grandmother to die, or even if her grandmother was actually going to die this time. Nobody could expect Rebecca to know this. She could only deal with a day at a time. If there was no change over the weekend—if Esther had not yet died but seemed to be imminently dying—then she would simply have to call in Monday morning and throw herself at the mercy of Jan, who ran the department scheduling desk.