“You were unwell? Last night? I’m sorry to hear that. I hope you get used to it.”

“Used to it?”

“To the days blending in to one another,” he says, biting into his egg. “That’s what happens here.”

Ruth and Pete are busy eating. Pete, as usual, is slumped and focused entirely on his food. I can tell that Ruth is keeping an eye on us, though.

“I’m feeling good here,” I whisper. “But I’m still new. I’m still getting used to it.”

“This. Each day,” he says. “What we do here doesn’t change. We work.”

Something shifts inside me when he says this.

“We all have our own work, but the days feel the same for us. Space and time are misleading. Think about equivalent fractions. The fractions that have distinct numerators and denominators but are equal to the same value. Three-sixths and four-eighths are both equal to one-half. They’re all the same.”

He puts the other half of the egg in his mouth.

“Maybe there’s something we could do to change that,” I say. “So things don’t blend together.”

“I doubt it. I think it’s always been this way here,” he says. “I think that’s how she wants it.”

I take a bite of toast. Chew, swallow.

“Would you sit for me?” I ask.

It takes him a few seconds to understand what I’ve just asked. He wipes his mouth with his napkin and appears to perk up.

“I’m not sure she’d condone that,” he says.

“I’m not sure, either,” I say.

“Well,” he says, making a ticking sound with his tongue as he thinks. “Yes.”

The way he answers, it almost sounds like he’s asking me a question. But I don’t care. He said yes.

The last person to sit for me was a woman from our building. It must have been a decade ago. She wasn’t familiar with art or portraiture or surrealism. She was a single mother, a server at a café two streets over. She had the most remarkable face: perfectly round and lined and serene. I wanted her to see her face how I saw it. The beauty, the toughness, the grace, the experience. It was all there. But like all my work, I never felt like my painting of her was finished, so I never showed it to her.

A flare of excitement in my belly, a tingling.

I nod and start back into my breakfast, helping myself to a third egg.

“It’s time for a meeting,” Shelley says brusquely, as she clears our empty plates away.

We don’t say anything, but stand and start toward the common room. I’m trying to catch Hilbert’s eye, but he doesn’t look my way, as if he believes he’s not supposed to. His expression is flat and hard to read as he stares straight ahead.

We walk single file along the hallway. The only sounds are our footsteps and Shelley humming behind us.

We all find our seats. It’s warmer in here than in the dining room or in the hallway. I can feel the sun’s heat from the window on my arm. No one speaks. Not Hilbert or Ruth. Of course not Pete. Not even Shelley. She’s just sitting there, smiling, looking back at us.