Whatever the reason, it was the wrong call. Leo was offended. He might say it’s all right and that he respects me and that he can wait, but he got instantly distant with me after I wanted to stop. He couldn’t help it. He was disappointed.

Yeah, well. I’m disappointed, too.

I sign and date the sketch. It needs a title. I scrawl a word I like: crestfallen. That’s what Leo was. His crest had definitely fallen. I snort, then erase the word carefully. Not ready, I write instead.

Not ready. I sigh. I flip back through the journal, past the pages and pages of sketches like this one, documenting the moments of my life as intimately as any diary would. There are so many drawings of Leo. Leo on the beach at Santa Cruz, the sea breeze ruffling his hair. Leo tying his shoe. Leo in swim trunks that one time we swam in his aboveground backyard pool, his back to me as he stood at the edge of the water, the muscles tightened as he prepared to dive in. He’s beautiful. Built. Sexy. What is wrong with me?

I flip back a few more pages, to February and the first sketch I ever did of Leo, at his mother’s show.

He was slumped in a chair to one side of the gallery, a modern teenage boy as Rodin’s Thinker, rumpled hoodie, holes in his jeans, elbow propped on his knee and his chin in his hand. I knew after two seconds of seeing him that he was Diana Robinson’s son. For a minute I just stood there, looking, internalizing his shapes and shading for this sketch, the one I’d do of him later. Then I actually went over and talked to him, a move so unlike my introverted self that thinking back on it surprises me every time. How was I so inexplicably brave that day?

“It must be weird” is what I said to him.

He looked up, startled. “Weird?”

“To be your mom’s, like, muse.” Almost all of Diana Robinson’s sculptures featured a little boy doing something strangely adult: reading Proust, driving a car, shaving, fastening a cuff link to his sleeve. I’d recognized Leo from the back—that cowlick he has on the right side of his head. It’s in every sculpture, that uncooperative swirl of hair.

“How did you . . .” Leo seemed confused at how I knew who he was, but then he glanced around and realized. “Uh, yeah. It’s weird. Little bit.”