The third ward of the hospital took the longest because Claire kept changing it.
Not because she was unhappy with what she had started. Because the story she was telling kept expanding as she worked, taking in new things she needed it to hold, and walls do not argue.
She had started with something simple. A city seen from above, bridges and water and small figures crossing between things, the visual language of people finding their way. But as the weeks passed the figures became particular, not named, not portraits exactly, but carrying specificity. A woman in a too large dress walking down a long aisle. A man standing in a kitchen in the dark. Two people sitting on a floor with a fire going somewhere behind them.
The ward nurse who had watched her work for three weeks stood in the door
