Summer came in the way summer comes to New York, sudden and a little aggressive, the city trading its grey composure for something louder and sweatier and completely indifferent to preference.
Claire’s studio in Brooklyn had been open for two months and she had already filled one wall with preliminary work, the children’s hospital commission completed and three new projects beginning to take shape in the particular slow way of things that start as feelings and gradually become lines.
She kept a photograph above her desk. Not a romantic one, not Nathaniel, though there were plenty of those in her sketchbooks. It was a photograph of the hardware store, taken on the Monday it reopened after the inspection clearance, her father in the doorway with the particular expression of a man standing
