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.

He leaned forward then, and the look on his face was the one he used only when saying the most important thing in the room and refusing to soften it.

“You spent years giving away parts of yourself for us. Not unhappily. Not resentfully. But still, you gave them. This is me giving some back.”

The video ended with his usual signoff.

Until tomorrow, my love.

I sat in the studio for a long time afterward while snow light drifted across the floorboards and the smell of paint returned to me like a language I had once spoken fluently in dreams.

There was a storage closet behind the room. In it, exactly where he said it would be in a later recording, stood a large, custom-built canvas meant for the great room below. Blank. Waiting.

Over the next several weeks I sketched obsessively.