My husband sat in court beside the “Bu.tcher of Broadway,” mocking me like I’d already lost—after freezing my accounts and cutting me off. The judge was seconds from ruling in his favor… Then the doors burst open. A woman in a white suit walked in—and the moment his lawyer saw her, everything fell apart.

At first I painted at night in the guest room of the Fifth Avenue apartment Judge Henderson gave me temporary use of. The apartment felt obscene to be in alone after years of sharing it with a man whose preferences had shaped every lamp and throw pillow in it, so I turned the smallest bedroom into a studio and let the rest of the place sit silent around me like a museum exhibit of expensive control.

I painted on the floor.

On stretched canvas and butcher paper and one old door panel I found in storage because I wanted a surface that already knew about impact.

At first the paintings were all motion and fracture. Black lines. Red fields. White torn through with gold like bone in x-ray. I didn’t show anyone. Not even my mother. They weren’t meant to be seen. They were meant to keep me from calling Keith back.

Then, one night in late October, Catherine came by the apartment carrying soup from a place on Madison she claimed was the only one in the city that didn’t confuse elegance with under-seasoning. She found me barefoot on the studio floor, jeans stained with cobalt and ocher, staring at a canvas taller than I was with my arms folded because I no longer knew what it wanted.