Chapter 23: Rochelle Teller

Six weeks later I signed my name at the kitchen table in my new apartment in Portland.

The envelope had come that morning by courier, thick and cream, with the Halvorsen seal on the flap.

Joanna sat across from me in a flowered shirt, eating cold noodles out of the carton and watching me sign.

"Read the last page," she said. "The last page is where they hide the awful stuff."

"There is no awful stuff."

"There is always awful stuff."

I read it.

The sale had closed on Friday.

My thirty percent had landed in an account in my own name, with a number on it that I had to look at twice.

The page in front of me was the last release.

I picked up the pen, a plain black one, and signed Rochelle Teller.

I had not written that name in five years.

The loops came back to my hand without trying.

"There she is," Joanna said, and slid the noodles across the table. "Eat."

I ate.

On the wall above her head hung the first page of my next job, a picture book about a girl who builds a boat out of paper.

I had drawn it in four days, in my own studio, with the window open.

It was the first thing I had made in years that had nobody's name on it but mine.

Tripp had signed his divorce papers three weeks before, from a rented room in a town I'd never heard of.

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