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with me, and as I fell asleep that night, it was the painting teacher’s voice I heard, telling his student to put his fear into his painting.
    How easy it would be, I thought as I drifted off to sleep, to be able to take all of my fear and put it into a painting. To rid myself of it like that. I wondered if it worked. If you could paint yourself sane.

    The next morning my grandmother left the apartment early again but was back for lunch. The following day, Wednesday, our routine resumed. On Thursday, for the third time that week, she left at ten.
    I’m not sure why I did what I did that day. Perhaps the sinister goings-on in The Picture of Dorian Gray were affecting my thinking. But I had become certain Grand-mère was hiding something. When she told me she was going on one of these excursions, she always looked away from me slightly.
    Papa had the same affectation whenever he was telling me something not quite true.
    That Thursday morning, I grabbed my overcoat and followed her out. I’d never tried to trail anyone before, but I’d read enough of the very popular Sherlock Holmes books—one of Papa’s favorite characters in literature—to know the basics.
    Keep a good distance between you and the suspect.
    Stay close to the buildings.
    Watch for the subject’s sudden movements.
    Hang back in the shadows if the suspect turns.
    Papa appreciated Holmes’s deductive reasoning, and we often read the stories at the same time so we could try our hand at outguessing the master detective. My father was far better at it than I was.
    Sometimes on the street, we’d follow the careful rules of observation Holmes engaged in, and we’d spot something—a curious scuff on someone’s shoes, an umbrella with a strange nick in the handle, a woman with a parcel of unusual proportions—and guess what might be behind these oddities.
    By the time I reached the corner of our block, Grand-mère had turned right and was almost to the next corner. I watched her crossthe street and turn right again. I followed, but by the time I got to the next corner, she was gone. How had she managed to disappear so quickly? I looked left. There was no one in sight with Grand-mère’s rust-colored coat. I glanced in the opposite direction, but there was no one to the right either—or was there? Did I see a flounce of her dress turning into the rue des Saints-Pères?
    I ran for a few yards and reached rue des Saints-Pères in time to see her stop in front of our family home, Maison de la Lune. The house that she’d moved out of and closed down. What was Grand-mère doing here? And why lie to me about it? Why invent a friend who needed advice, or an appointment with a hairdresser or glove maker, if she was just going home?
    It was then I noticed a man step out of the shadows beside the porte cochère. He was quite tall and towered over her as he bent to kiss her hand. His profile was to me, so when he rose, I could not see his face, but his hair was dark, like the color of a raven’s wing. His long fingers curled around the portfolio case he was handling with ease. His black coat was stylishly cut. When he moved, it was with an effortless grace. He looked like the kind of man my father would have said was comfortable in his own skin.
    Together, the man and my grandmother stepped inside the courtyard, and the street doors shut after them.
    They might be inside for a long time. Should I leave? It was a cloudy day with a chill in the air. There wasn’t any point in waiting, was there? What would seeing them exit tell me? What did I want to know?
    I turned and started to walk away when I experienced a moment of dizziness. I put my hand on the wall of the building and stood still for a moment. I was facing the Maison de la Lune again. Looking at her walls, her steps, her windows. I wanted to be inside her, enclosed within her walls, sitting on the green velvet couches in the parlor and looking at the colors the lovely stained glass windows cast on the