So I sat there in the kitchen and watched him walk down the hall. He got his coat from the hook by the front door and put it on. A moment later, the door closed behind him and I was alone in the house. The Professor was off visiting his friend Lucius. Goon—properly Olaf Goonasekara, the Professor’s housekeeper—was also out. None of my friends would be dropping by because they knew I was spending the evening with Daniel.

I wished now that I’d let one of them in on what I’d planned to do tonight. I hadn’t because I was sure they’d try to talk me out of it. I’d probably have let them talk me out of it. But I knew I’d done the right thing.

At least I thought I did.

I stayed in the kitchen, staring down the hall and not moving for a long time, before I finally turned the wheelchair around and rolled it into the refurbished greenhouse at the back of the house. Sophie and I shared the greenhouse as studio space. The long work tables held a barrage of art supplies: tubes of paint, palettes, brushes, sketchbooks, pencils, charcoal. We each had an easel set up and there were canvases everywhere, leaning against the walls and crammed under the tables. The room smelled of turps and the geraniums that Goon wintered on shelves along one wall.

It was easy to tell who worked where. My area looked like a hurricane had hit it, and the paintings were all big, blocky pieces without a lot of details. Sophie’s was perfectly organized, and her paintings were far more accomplished than anything I’ve been able to do in years.

Messy though my area was, I didn’t really do that much in it because I hadn’t been able to paint properly since the accident. And no, don’t feel sorry for me. I was alive, wasn’t I? I could still move around. I used the wheelchair in the evening because I was usually just so tired by that point, but most of the day I got from here to there by walking. Okay, shuffling, with a cane or two, but I was still mobile. A lot of people didn’t even have that. I used the chair when I went to rehab, or if somebody took me out so that we weren’t forced to go at the snail’s pace I could manage, but I wasn’t trapped in it.

Not like I was trapped in my inability to make art—or at least the kind of art I wanted to make. The art I once did make. Nowadays my best art took place in my imagination.