And what about this: What if her desire to have a baby was so powerful that it had vanquished her doubts about Henry? Had she become a woman who wanted to become a mother at all costs, even by a man she did not trust, a man who was not trustworthy?

She had come downtown to the studio to try to find clarity, but she was finding the opposite. The aloneness, the quiet, the dust, were all activating her worst worries.

The dust: that she could do something about. She took off her sweater, filled a bucket with soapy water, and wiped down the counters of her modest kitchen. Never underestimate the calming powers of cleaning; maybe that was why she was so often on edge when she was married to Morton. He wouldn’t let her clean. Ivan wouldn’t let her cook. The interior decorator would never let her rearrange the furniture. She had her work, her walks … but none of those chores that soothed an unquiet mind.

The counters were just the beginning. She moved on to the bathroom, the windowsills. Even with the windows tightly closed, the cloth still came away black. New York could be filthy, invasively pestilential.

Suddenly she felt tired, drained. She was coming off one of the worst nights of her life, and she had just used up her last grains of energy cleaning an apartment she did not even live in.

In the kitchen cupboard was a bottle of burgundy. She knew that she was not meant to drink again until after the retrieval. She had eaten little that day and her brain was already pretty scrambled … but that pretty French label with its engraving of a château surrounded by formal gardens seemed to be beckoning her, saying, Herein lies ease. And she could do with some ease.

She found her corkscrew, rinsed out a glass, and poured herself un’ombra, a shadow, of wine; a safe shadow. Then she picked up a rag and a can of furniture polish and sat down at her desk.

How many hours she had sat at this desk, and how serene they had been—or seemed to have been, in retrospect. She had bought the desk at the flea market in Chelsea. The man who sold it to her said that it looked like a well-loved piece of furniture, a table with history. She had to agree. That was why she chose it. She liked to think of the desk’s former life. Someone, several someones, had sat before her at this slab of walnut, thinking, working; even writing, maybe. A softening of its edge toward the left, an indentation worn down over time, led her to believe that its previous owner had been left-handed. The top drawer—she opened it to make sure—had for the longest time retained an old scent, a combination of tobacco and lavender. It still did, faintly.