The fluorescent bulb above the third-floor landing had been flickering for three weeks. Eliza Vance had stopped noticing it until now, standing on the threadbare carpet outside apartment 3-B, her keys half-raised, her shoulder pressed against the doorframe. The buzz of failing current cut through the hallway silence like a wasp trapped behind glass.
Inside her apartment, something was wrong.
She could smell it before she saw it. Coffee, burnt and bitter, the way it smells when someone leaves the pot on the burner until the water evaporates and the grounds char to a black crust. That smell meant Mr. Chen had been waiting long enough to brew a pot and forget about it.
Eliza slid her key into the lock. The deadbolt turned with a grinding reluctance that matched her own. She pushed the door open and found him standing in the narrow galley kitchen, his straw fedora in his weathered hands, his face drawn into an expression she had seen before but never grown accustomed to receiving.
"Mr. Chen."
"Miss Eliza." His voice was quieter than usual, the Cantonese lilt more pronounced when he was tired, when the performance of American plainness fell away. "You are late."
"I've been at the studio. Sorting through the kilns." She closed the door behind her, letting the latch click. The apartment settled around them, all 380 square feet of it: the daybed against the far wall, still unmade from this morning; the rack of finished pieces she'd been too tired to shelve; the window that looked out onto an airshaft cluttered with satellite dishes. "I left you a message."
"I do not listen to messages. You know this." He set the fedora on the counter, carefully, the way he set down a freshly annealed bowl. "I have been here two hours."
The burnt coffee pot sat on the burner, a dark film crusting the glass carafe. Two mugs waited beside it, one chipped at the rim. Mr. Chen had prepared to share his vigil. The thought made her chest tighten.
"Sit down, Mr. Chen. Please. Let me make a fresh pot."
"Sit." He gestured toward the single chair at the table, a secondhand oak number she'd found on the sidewalk in better days. "You sit. I have made what I have made. It will not be wasted."
She sat. The chair creaked under her, the same complaint it had been making for the eight months she'd lived here. Mr. Chen poured from the carafe, the coffee coming out thick and black, and set the mug before her with both hands. A small ceremony. The steam curled upward, already thin, already dying.
"You know why I am here," he said.
"I have a guess."
He lowered himself onto the daybed edge, his knees popping. At seventy-four, Mr. Chen moved like a man perpetually negotiating with his own joints. He had been her father's studio assistant for thirty-one years. He had outlasted two studio locations, three economic recessions, and one stroke that had left his left hand unreliable for fine work. He had not, until now, ever come to her apartment uninvited.
"Your father," he said, and stopped. The word hung in the air between them. Your father. As though Daniel Vance were a country Mr. Chen had emigrated from long ago and still wrote letters to.
"Mr. Chen. I know about the rent."
"Then you know I have waited."
"I know." She wrapped her hands around the mug, letting the warmth seep into her palms. The coffee tasted like char and regret. "I know you have waited, and I know you have been patient, and I know that's not fair of me to ask."
"Six months, Miss Eliza."
"Six months and eleven days."
"Since your father's studio was sealed."
The words landed in her chest like a stone dropped into still water. Sealed. Not closed. Not shuttered. Sealed, the way the police had sealed it, with that yellow tape across the door and a deputy standing guard for forty-eight hours while they catalogued every piece of equipment, every sketchbook, every shard of cullet in the scrap bins. The studio where she had learned to blow glass at twelve years old, standing beside her father at the bench, her hands too small for the jacks but determined to try.
"I have been generous," Mr. Chen said, and there it was: the shift in register, the gentle man's gentle rebuke. "The building is not mine, but the building's owner is not generous. The building's owner has expenses. Insurance. The new boiler. The repairs to the roof after the January rain."
"I know."
"The building's owner has been patient because I asked. Because I explained that Miss Eliza is grieving, that Miss Eliza needs time, that Miss Eliza's father was a man of honor who always paid his debts even when he could not afford to pay other bills."
Eliza looked down at her coffee. A skin had formed on the surface, a thin brown membrane. She had not been invited to her father's funeral. She had learned of his death from a detective's phone call at three in the morning, while she was in the middle of a firing schedule, the glory hole temperature reading 2150 degrees and her life rearranging itself around a single sentence: Miss Vance, we need you to come down to the morgue.
"I have told the building's owner," Mr. Chen continued, "that Miss Eliza will pay what she owes by Friday."
"Friday."
"Friday." He folded his hands in his lap, his knuckles swollen, the knuckles of a man who had spent decades lifting hot glass with a wooden block. "This Friday. Three days from now. I have given my word."
The mug was hot against her fingers. She thought of her bank account, the balance she had checked that morning with the specific dread of a woman who knows what she will find. The balance had not changed since yesterday, or the day before. A few hundred dollars, earmarked for the cost of annealing a new commission piece, would not cover six months of back rent on a Koreatown studio apartment in a building owned by a man who had already shown more patience than she deserved.
"How much," she said, though she knew.
"Four thousand, two hundred dollars." He delivered the number the way he delivered temperatures: precisely, without inflection, as though precision could make the heat bearable. "Plus the late fees the building's owner has chosen not to charge. He is a good man, in his way. A businessman, but a man."
"A businessman who wants his money."
"A man who has waited six months." Mr. Chen raised his eyes to hers. "As I have waited. As your father waited, when the gallery in Santa Monica delayed payment for fourteen weeks and we still had rent due on the first."
The memory arrived unbidden: her father at the kitchen table, his glasses pushed up onto his forehead, a spreadsheet printed on continuous-feed paper, his hand rubbing at the back of his neck in that gesture he had when the numbers did not work. Daniel Vance, who had believed that craft would carry a man through any difficulty, that a beautiful object would find its buyer if the maker held faith.
"Mr. Chen," she said. "I can't pay that by Friday."
The words left her mouth and landed in the small apartment and stayed there. Mr. Chen did not move. He did not sigh. He looked at her with the steady regard of a man who had spent his life watching glass take shape, who knew that patience was a form of heat applied over time.
"Then," he said, "I must tell the building's owner that you cannot pay."
"And?"
"And the building's owner will begin eviction proceedings. The notice will be posted on the door. The marshal will come. You will have fourteen days to remove your belongings."
Fourteen days. Enough time to find a new place, if she had the first month's rent and the deposit. Which she did not have. Enough time to put her few finished pieces into storage, if she could afford the storage unit, which she could not. Enough time, in other words, to lose everything her father had built.
Or.
"Unless," Mr. Chen said, and the word opened like a kiln door.
Eliza looked up.
"Unless Miss Eliza considers the studio."
"The studio is sealed."
"The studio is no longer sealed. The police have finished. The yellow tape was removed last week." He paused, choosing his next words with the care he chose temperatures. "I have spoken to the building's owner of your father's estate. The estate owes the building's owner six months of back rent on the studio space. The building's owner would accept payment of that back rent as settlement of your personal debt. A swap, you understand. The building's owner is paid. Miss Eliza is paid. The accounts are clean."
She sat up straighter. "The back rent on the studio is how much?"
"Four thousand, two hundred dollars. The same number. A coincidence." The ghost of a smile crossed his face. "Your father always said the universe had no sense of humor, only arithmetic."
The coincidence, of course, was not coincidence. Mr. Chen had engineered this number. He had gone to the building's owner and proposed a settlement that would clear both debts at once, a settlement that required Eliza to come up with only one sum instead of two. He had done this because he loved her father, and because he loved her, and because he was a man who expressed love in the language of ledgers.
But the studio was sealed. No, the studio was no longer sealed. The police had finished.
"Can I go in?" she asked.
"The building's owner has agreed that you may enter the studio to inventory the contents. To determine what belongs to the estate and what is personal property. To prepare for the sale of the equipment, perhaps, if the estate cannot pay what is owed."
The equipment. Her father's glory hole, the furnace he had hand-built in 1994, the annealing oven with the cracked insulation that he had never replaced because the crack was on the side away from the heat source. The bench, scarred with a decade of glass contacts. The jacks and paddles and blocks, the hand tools that smelled of wood smoke and sweat.
"Sale of the equipment," she repeated.
"The estate may have other assets. Insurance. The contents of the studio itself, some of which have value to collectors." Mr. Chen's eyes moved to the rack of finished pieces by her window. "Miss Eliza is a glass artisan. Miss Eliza can determine what is worth what."
"And if the estate pays the back rent?"
"Then Miss Eliza's debt is paid. And Miss Eliza has access to the studio. To continue her father's work. To make her own work." He paused. "To find what the police were looking for."
The last sentence came out quieter than the others, almost an afterthought, but it struck her in a different place. The police had been looking for something. The police had sealed the studio for forty-eight hours and catalogued every piece of paper in the file cabinet and every sketch in the flat files, and they had not told her what they were looking for, only that her father's death had been ruled a homicide and that the investigation was ongoing.
"Mr. Chen." She set the mug down. "What did they take?"
"They took samples. From the kilns. From the floor. I do not know what they were looking for. They did not tell me." He looked down at his hands. "I am a studio assistant, Miss Eliza. I was not invited to ask questions."
"You always asked questions."
"Your father invited questions. The police did not."
The buzzer from the airshaft window cut into the silence, a low electrical drone that made her think of glory holes running at temperature, the roar of gas jets she could feel through the soles of her shoes. Outside, somewhere below, a car alarm started and then stopped, a false alarm in a building full of false alarms.
"Three days," she said.
"Three days."
"I can inventory the studio. I can make a list of the equipment and estimate its value. I can put the word out to the dealers I know." She was already doing the math in her head, running the numbers the way her father had run them, the way the numbers had always been run in their family: with the desperate optimism of people who believed that the next commission would cover the last commission's shortfall. "But I can't sell anything in three days. The collectors I know need at least two weeks to evaluate a major piece. And the furnace alone, that's a custom build, that could take a month to move if anyone wants it."
"Then Miss Eliza must find another way."
"Another way to find four thousand, two hundred dollars in three days."
"Yes."
She picked up the mug again, more to give her hands something to do than to drink. The coffee was cold now, the skin on the surface broken where her lips had touched it.
"The studio has finished pieces," Mr. Chen said. "In the storage racks. Your father's last commissions. Some are paid for. Some are not. The ones that are not paid for are the property of the estate."
"I know."
"Some of them are valuable."
"I know, Mr. Chen. I made some of them. I know what they're worth."
"Then Miss Eliza knows that among the finished pieces there are objects of considerable value. Objects that could be sold, quickly, to the right buyer, without the long process of consignment."
She looked at him. He looked back. Neither of them said what they were both thinking: that selling her father's finished pieces would be a betrayal of a kind, a small death in addition to the large one. Her father had made those pieces for specific collectors, for specific gallery shows, for the people who had waited years for his work. To sell them out of necessity, to a dealer who would mark them up and flip them, was to break a covenant.
But the alternative was the marshal and the fourteen days and the loss of everything.
"I need to see the studio," she said.
"Yes."
"Tomorrow morning. Early. Before anyone else gets there."
"I will open it for you at seven. The building's owner has given me a key." He stood, slowly, his knees negotiating with him again. "Miss Eliza should sleep. Miss Eliza should think. Miss Eliza should not decide tonight."
He picked up his fedora from the counter and set it on his head with the care of a man who has dressed the same way for sixty years. He moved toward the door, and she followed him, and at the threshold he stopped and turned.
"Your father," he said, "would not have wanted you to lose the studio."
"My father," she said, "would not have left me with this mess."
"No. He would not have." Mr. Chen looked at her for a long moment. "But he did."
He left. She closed the door behind him and leaned against it, listening to his footsteps descend the stairs, each step a small percussion in the old building's wooden frame. The fluorescent in the hallway buzzed on, indifferent to the hour.
Eliza stood in her apartment and looked at the rack of finished pieces by the window. Six objects she had made in the last six months, since her father's death. A set of blown vessels with applied threading, each one a study in blue and gold. A paperweight with a suspended core of copper wire. A small platter with a rolled lip, the rim catching the last of the streetlight. Beautiful, all of them. Not enough.
She crossed to the kitchen counter and poured the rest of Mr. Chen's burnt coffee down the sink. The carafe rattled against the basin. She rinsed it, set it upside down on the drying rack, and turned off the burner.
The silence in the apartment was not really silence. There was the refrigerator's hum, the muffled television from the unit below, the distant complaint of a bus pulling away from the stop on Wilshire. She stood at the window and looked out at the airshaft, at the satellite dishes angled toward nothing in particular, at the small square of sky above that was orange with the city's glow.
Three days. Four thousand, two hundred dollars. The studio where her father had died.
She reached for her phone and opened the contacts. Scrolled past the names she did not want to call: the gallery owners who had owed her father money, the collectors who had stopped returning her messages after the funeral, the lawyer who had handled the estate's initial paperwork and then gone on vacation. Past all of them, to the T's.
Teddy Fisk. Art appraiser. Old college friend. The man who had once spent an entire spring break sleeping on her couch because he'd missed his flight home and was too proud to call his mother for a ticket.
She had not spoken to Teddy in almost a year. The last time had been at her father's memorial service, where he had held her hand for the duration of the eulogy and then disappeared into the crowd without saying goodbye. He had sent a card. She had not replied.
She stared at his name on the screen.
The cursor blinked in the message field, waiting.
Her thumb hovered. She typed three words, deleted them, typed four more. The message she finally sent was so stripped of feeling it could have been dictated to a machine: Teddy, it's Eliza. Are you free today?
The reply came in eleven seconds. God, yes. Where?
She did not smile, but something in her shoulders loosened, a fraction of an inch.
---
By eleven she was on a downtown train, standing near the doors with one hand on the overhead bar and the other pressed flat against her bag. The car smelled of wet wool and someone's lunch, and through the scratched window the city blurred into streaks of brick and steel. Teddy had texted that he was at a viewing on the Upper East Side until one, and could meet her after at a coffee place on Houston. She had typed back fine and left it at that. He would understand. He always had.
The studio's silence sat in her chest the way a held breath sat, tight and waiting.
---
The Coffee was a narrow room wedged between a vintage clothing store and a place that sold only mushrooms. Someone had painted the walls the color of strong tea and hung mismatched frames above the counter, and the espresso machine made a noise like a small engine clearing its throat. Teddy was already there, occupying a corner table with his coat draped over the back of his chair and his phone face-down beside a cup he had not touched.
He stood when he saw her. "Eliza."
"You look well," she said, which was a lie. He looked thinner than she remembered, the angles of his face more pronounced, the way a building looks when a familiar cornice has been removed.
"I look like a man who has been appraising dead people's furniture for six months," he said. "Sit. Please. I ordered you something."
"I didn't ask for anything."
"I know. I got you an Americano because you always drink Americanos and then complain about them. Consider it a gesture of pre-emptive criticism." He pulled out her chair, a courtly little motion that would have been insufferable from anyone else. From Teddy it was just how he moved through the world.
She sat. The coffee arrived. She wrapped her hands around the cup and did not drink.
"You're not here for the coffee," he said.
"No."
"I didn't think so." He leaned forward, elbows on the table, and for a moment he looked exactly like the twenty-two-year-old who had once spilled an entire box of archival tissue on the floor of a campus library and tried to pretend it was confetti. "Talk to me."
She told him. Not everything; not yet. But the bones of it: the studio she had just entered for the first time in three days, the smell of dust and metal, the deadbolt that had been engaged from within, and most of all the backroom with its shelves of glass and its strange central workbench. She described the paper, the cylinder, the burnished brass lid. She did not tell him yet what it had said, only that there was writing, and that it had been placed somewhere it should not have been.
Teddy listened without interrupting. He had always been good at that, she remembered. He would fold his hands and tilt his head and you could almost see him filing things, not in a cold way but in the way a librarian shelves books by subject and then by author.
When she stopped, he was quiet for a long moment. Then: "You're not asking me to authenticate a piece. You're asking me to tell you what kind of object it is."
"Yes."
"And you don't want to go to the police."
"I don't know what I want from the police," she said. "That's part of why I'm here."
He nodded. He picked up his cup, put it down without drinking, and said, "I'll come tomorrow. Early. Before the superintendent notices. I'll bring a loupe and a notebook and we will be very quiet and very boring and if anyone asks I am there to assess humidity damage to the east wall, which is plausible because there is always humidity damage to the east wall."
The knot behind her sternum loosened another fraction. She did not thank him. She said, "Your hair is different."
"I cut it," he said. "For a wedding."
"You hate weddings."
"The bride is very rich and has very nice things and I wanted an excuse to look at the things."
That startled something out of her that was almost a laugh. He smiled, small and private, the kind of smile that had once made half their graduating class swoon and that he had never seemed to notice doing.
She finished the coffee. He pretended not to watch her do it.
---
On the walk home, the cold found the gaps between her scarf and her collar and the tops of her boots. She kept her hands in her pockets and walked faster than she needed to. At the corner of Mott and Grand she stopped to let a fire truck pass, its siren dopplering away down the block, and she realized that she was, for the first time in three days, thinking about something other than the studio door.
The object on the bench. The brushed brass lid. The paper she had not touched.
Begin again. Begin again. Begin again.
She turned east toward home.
Sleep came in pieces. She lay in her narrow bed above the shop, the radiator ticking its unreliable rhythm, and she rehearsed the conversation with Teddy Fisk until the words stopped sounding like words and started sounding like the inside of a music box, a mechanism that played the same three notes over and over.
I'm here about the extension. I'm here about the interest. I'm here about the small problem I have with your small problem.
At four in the morning she gave up, got up, made tea she did not drink, and sat in the window seat that overlooked the shop's display. Her father's work had been replaced, over the years, with her own. The same light. The same cases. The same small hours when the city went quiet and the glass could be heard, if a person listened, settling into its new temperature.
At seven she called the studio and told Mr. Chen she would be late. He made the soft sound that meant he understood and would not ask. Then she put on her good coat, the one with the lining that had been repaired twice and was beginning to look like a palimpsest, and she walked to the subway.
Teddy Fisk kept an office above a pawnshop on Atlantic, three blocks from the Barclays Center, in a building that smelled permanently of other people's mistakes. The pawnshop's window displayed a saxophone with a bent neck, a wedding ring with a stone the color of a bruise, and a cardboard sign that read CASH FOR GOLD in letters that had been repainted so many times the gold had become a kind of sedimentary layer. The bell above the door jingled when she came in and the man behind the counter, who she had known for years and who was not named Teddy, jerked his chin toward the stairs without looking up from his phone.
She climbed. The carpet on the stairs was a rust color that had not been fashionable in any decade she could remember. The handrail was loose. At the top of the stairs was a door with a small plastic sign that read T. FISK, RECORDS RECORDS, which she had always taken to be a kind of joke, though she was no longer sure.
She knocked.
The voice from inside said, "It's open, and don't touch the frame."
She touched the frame anyway, because she had learned, years ago, that Teddy Fisk's warnings were tests, and that she had failed them often enough that he had stopped expecting her to pass. The frame was solid oak, original to the building, worth more than his entire operation. She let her fingers rest on it for a moment, feeling the old varnish, and then she went in.
Teddy Fisk was a man of forty-eight who had once been a man of twenty-four, which is to say he had once been a man who had gone to Columbia on a wrestling scholarship and had majored, briefly and disastrously, in philosophy. He had a face that suggested he had been handsome and a body that suggested he had stopped caring about the suggestion. He sat behind a desk that was a piece of furniture in the same way that a cadaver is a piece of sculpture, and he was eating a breakfast sandwich from a wrapper that had come from a bodega three blocks away and that he had laid out on the desk with the care of a man arranging evidence.
"Eliza," he said. "Sit. Don't sit there, sit here, the chair over there has a spring that wants to eat you. Coffee? No, you don't drink coffee from this office, nobody drinks coffee from this office, last guy who did lost a filling."
She sat in the chair he indicated. It was, she noted, the same chair that had eaten the spring five years ago. She made a mental note to inspect it before committing her full weight.
"Teddy," she said. "I'm here about the interest."
He bit into his sandwich. Egg ran down his wrist. He did not seem to notice, or perhaps he noticed and did not care, which was its own kind of message.
"Right," he said, mouth full. "The interest. The interest on the interest on the interest. The interest that interesteth. You're here about the interest. I am, as ever, happy to discuss the interest. The interest and I are old friends. We have been corresponding for some time. The interest writes to me, I write back, we have a whole thing going. You're here to crash the party."
He gestured with the sandwich. A piece of something fell onto the desk. He did not pick it up.
"I'm here," she said, "to ask for a week."
"A week."
"Seven days."
"I know how many days are in a week, Eliza, I was a philosophy major, we did the math."
She waited. Teddy Fisk's verbosity was a kind of weather. You could not rush it. You could only sit inside it and wait for it to pass.
He finished the sandwich. He wiped his hands on a napkin that had the logo of a moving company he had probably retained at some point in his life. He looked at her. His eyes were small and brown and, when he was not performing, surprisingly direct.
"A week," he said again. "A week from when."
"From today."
"And what happens in this week."
"I find something."
"Something."
"Something that pays you what I owe you, plus the interest, plus a premium that I am not going to name in this room because this room has ears and I don't mean the metaphorical kind, I mean the actual kind, the kind that the previous tenant installed and that I have never bothered to remove because the previous tenant also left behind a recording of himself singing 'My Way' and it's the only thing that keeps me company at night."
She did not smile. He did not seem to expect her to.
"What kind of something," he said.
"Art."
"Eliza."
"I'm serious."
"You're always serious. That's your problem. No, that's not your problem. Your problem is that you are a serious person who keeps borrowing money from people like me, and people like me are not serious people, and the combination of these two facts produces a kind of friction that I have been told is, in physics, called heat."
He opened a drawer. He took out a manila folder that he did not open. He set it on the desk between them like a card in a game whose rules he had invented and she was expected to learn on the fly.
"Art," he said. "What kind of art. And don't say 'the glass,' because the glass is what you do, and what you do is not what you owe me, and what you owe me is the reason you are sitting in the chair that does not eat people, which is a chair I have moved you into on multiple occasions and which you have never once appreciated."
She told him.
She told him about the studio. About the door. About the object on the bench with the brushed brass lid and the paper she had not touched. She did not tell him about Eleanor Huang's husband. She did not tell him about the brushed brass lid's provenance. She told him enough that he could infer the rest, which was the kind of compromise she had learned to make in this room, in this chair, across this desk.
He listened. He did not interrupt. When she was done he picked up the folder, opened it, and read from it. The folder contained, she realized, a printout of a ledger of her debts to him, kept in a font that was either a deliberate affectation or a sincere mistake.
"Seven days," he said. "Plus the premium."
"Yes."
"Plus the original principal."
"Yes."
"Plus a finder’s fee, because if I understand correctly, you are going to be the one doing the finding, and I am the one providing the finder, and the finder’s fee is, by tradition, the finder's cut, and the cut is, by my calculation, fifteen percent, which is generous, and I am being generous, Eliza, I am being the most generous I have ever been, and I want you to remember that, because the next time you are sitting in this chair I am going to be less generous, and the time after that I am going to be the opposite of generous, and the time after that I am not going to be in this office at all, I am going to be in a different office, and the person in that office is going to have a different folder, and the folder is going to be a different color."
She waited.
He closed the folder.
"Done," he said. "Seven days. Fifteen percent. Plus expenses."
"Plus expenses."
"I have expenses. I have to pay the guy who runs the pawnshop downstairs to not tell anyone who comes up those stairs, and that guy is expensive, and his expenses are going to be reflected in your expenses, and his expenses include a subscription to a sports package that I do not understand and that I do not want to understand and that I am, nonetheless, paying for, on your behalf, in spirit."
He stood up. He came around the desk. He stood over her. He smelled of egg and of the cologne he had been wearing since college and that had, by now, become a kind of signature.
"Seven days," he said. "And Eliza."
"Yes."
"Don't touch anything you shouldn't touch. Don't open anything you shouldn't open. Don't promise anyone anything you can't deliver. And don't come back to this office until you have something I can put in the folder, because the folder is, right now, the only thing standing between you and a series of conversations I do not want to have."
She stood. The chair did not, in fact, try to eat her. She made a mental note to inspect the other one on her way out, in the spirit of thoroughness.
"Teddy," she said.
"Eliza."
"Thank you."
"Don't thank me. Thank the folder. The folder is doing the work. The folder and the guy downstairs with the sports package."
She went out. She touched the frame on her way through the door, because it was, after all, the kind of frame that asked to be touched.
Downstairs, the man behind the counter glanced up from his phone. "He eat the sandwich?"
"He ate the sandwich."
"He always eats the sandwich. That's why I keep bringing it."
She pushed out into the morning. The cold hit her like a wall of small, polite fists. She turned toward the subway. She had seven days. She had a studio to open. She had a paper she had not touched, and a lid she had not lifted, and a man who had promised to come early and be quiet and boring, and an old man who had been quiet and boring for thirty years and had not, in all that time, ever once been boring to her.
She put her hands in her pockets. She walked faster than she needed to.
At the corner of Atlantic and Flatbush she stopped to let a bus pass, its brakes hissing in the cold, and she thought, for the second time in two days, that she was, against her own inclination and in defiance of her own better judgment, beginning to hope.
She turned east toward the studio.