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side. She opened her window. She felt some of the tension give way to anticipation. But she felt something else, too: an intensification of the ache in her chest. Because as she drove into the scenery, instead of taking it all in to store away for later, to process and distill onto a canvas the way she once could, she simply . . . didn’t. She took another painful breath and then the feeling of nothing returned and she was back where she had started.
    Ani was stirring in the backseat. “Mama?” she said.
    â€œWe’re close,” Ilsa said. “Really close.” She made eye contact with her daughter in the rearview mirror and smiled.“Shh. Try not to wake your little brother just yet.”
    Before he left for Copenhagen, Michael had suggested leaving the kids with Sylvie for the entire weekend rather than taking them to Muskoka. “Maybe you just need a break,” he had suggested, and she realized this was his way of acknowledging her distance from him. “Helen would be inconsolable,” Ilsa had said, unable to look him in the eye. And this had been before the party, before she had officially betrayed him instead of just fantasizing about betraying him. Now she was glad she had insisted. At least when she looked at Ani and Xavier she could always count on feeling something. Her paintings of them were the only ones that were good anymore. But no one wanted to host an art exhibition featuring nothing but dozens of paintings of a toddler boy and little girl.
    â€œHow’s it going?” Michael had asked her recently. “I feel like you haven’t shown me any paintings for a long time.” Indeed. Almost a year. All I have is a canvas filled with dark purple strokes, a line for each day that has passed since I’ve painted, and now it’s only purple, there is no white. She had not said this to her husband, though. She had looked at him and felt angry with him. How could you have not noticed until now? And then she had lied and said she had an exhibition coming up.
    But the date had come and gone and he hadn’t mentioned it again. She felt relieved not to have to lie about it, but something had told her he knew and just chose not to say anything about it. There was a cruelty in this that he wasn’t capable of understanding, but she felt it keenly.
    Now Ilsa pulled the car into the marina parking lot. As usual, one of the indeterminate number of sons of Johnny, the owner of the marina and restaurant on the property—it was dilapidated-looking on the outside, with white and blue paint flaking from wooden boards and a sign that read FLIPPER’S SEAFOOD in uneven script; none of it (and especially the fact that fish don’t even have flippers) betrayed the cult statusof the lake-caught fish dishes—walked toward the car.
    â€œHow long are you staying?” he asked when she rolled down her window. She tried to remember his name. Was this one Benjamin or Conrad or Tom? They all looked nearly the same. Sun-bleached hair that probably went dark blond in winter, tanned skin, blue eyes. And there was another one, too, a younger one, and she had absolutely no recollection of his name but she thought it started with a J . She looked closely at the boy. Maybe this was the youngest one. There was something about the way he spoke, with a touch of pride in what he was doing that the other boys didn’t have, not because they were disrespectful, but because they’d probably been doing it long enough not to want to do it anymore.
    â€œTuesday morning . . . I’m sorry, I don’t remember your name.”
    â€œJesse,” he said.
    â€œRight, Jesse.” She always tried to be kind to these boys because they were motherless—or at least their mothers weren’t present. Over the years, different women would pass through, vacuous blondes who all seemed the same to Ilsa. Inevitably, Johnny’s girlfriends would become