My husband had spent years warning me never to set foot on that farm. So after he passed away and the lawyer handed me the key, saying that from now on the place belonged to me, I was ready to sell it right away and put everything behind me. But before making my final decision, I still wanted to see it once for myself. When the door opened, I finally understood why, all those years, he had never wanted me to set foot there.

I had spent the previous week pretending I was only reorganizing the room, not avoiding the fact that it existed for me. I sorted tubes of paint. I read labels. I stood at the windows and looked out. I opened drawers and closed them. I told myself I was too tired, too distracted, too newly widowed, too old to begin again, too absurd to imagine that the version of myself who once painted with total conviction was waiting patiently inside a fifty-two-year-old schoolteacher in borrowed ranch boots.

Then I saw Midnight standing in the far pasture at dawn with steam lifting off him into the cold and some old instinct reached past all my arguments, and the first lines appeared on canvas before my fear had time to stop them.

When Jenna came to the studio doorway around noon, laptop in hand, there was wet paint on my fingers and light on the easel and the sort of shocked stillness in my body that only arrives when a lost self announces she has not, in fact, died.

“Today’s video is marked differently,” she said softly. “I think he knew.”

I wiped my hands and took the laptop.

The file title read: WHEN CATHERINE STARTS PAINTING AGAIN.

For a moment I couldn’t breathe.