“Unclear perceptions,” Rose says wearily. For identity purposes, her paintings are fairly worthless. “I had a gentleman caller last night. I perceived him as an animal. Now I’ve painted him that way. Doggone it!” Too tired to stand erect any longer, she walks to the couch and flops on it full length, her heels resting on one arm.

Mel steps through the doorframe.

“Careful,” Rose says again. Most of the glass is in neat little squares, safety glass, but bits crammed into the frame could be sharp.

“Someone broke in?” Mel asks incredulously.

“No. Someone came in, with a key, I think, then broke the door on his way out to make it look like he’d broken in,” Rose explains.

“How do you know?” Mel sounds as if she still does not trust Rose’s reality, simian or otherwise.

“On his second visit he didn’t leave the premises through the same door. I discovered the door broken but unlocked and open.”

“Somebody really broke in while you were here?”

Rose can see Mel absorbing the idea.

“Gigi, that’s awful!”

The genuine concern touches Rose. Oddly, it makes her leg and palms hurt. It makes her fatigue nearly unbearable. Mel cares. Rose is not going to let that weaken her. Mel does not need a grandmother who is any more of a burden than Rose already is.

“You know,” Rose says, making herself sit up and look moderately perky, “it’s not awful. It’s pretty wonderful. Remember I said I thought people at Longwood were plotting my demise?”

“I remember,” Mel says.

“Well, they were. They are. I am not crazy. QED.” As the words come from her lips, Rose realizes they are true. A psychic weight lifts. She is not crazy, not delusional. They really are out to kill her. This is such an excellent revelation, she laughs.

“Gigi, would you mind walking me through QED step by step?” Mel asks warily.

Rose does, from first awakening to final unfinished painting. She shows Mel the wreck of the bedroom and her clothes, the blood spatters and smears on the skylight. Looking from below with the sun behind them, they look like mud. For the finale, pointing proudly at the open sketchbook, Rose boasts, “I got his fingerprint.”

Mel is suitably impressed. She crosses the small kitchen to study the page of prints. “Wow!” she says, beaming at Rose. “How did you get him to give you fingerprints?”

Rose had left that part out as indelicate. “I … well, what happened was I accidentally ended up with his finger. Then I made the prints with that,” she says.

Then that story has to be told in full.

“You want to see it?” Rose finishes.

“What kind of grandmother are you?” Mel asks. “Offering to show an impressionable child a cut-off finger!”

“You’re way tougher than me,” Rose replies.