"Six," he said. "The first was a study. The rest are — different stages of understanding the subject."
"Understanding how?"
He thought about how to say it accurately.
"I draw people until I find what's actually there rather than what's apparent," he said. "Most people have a difference between the surface and the underneath. The drawings are the process of finding the underneath." He paused. "Six pages means I have the surface and I'm starting to find the edge of something else."
"What's the edge of," she said.
He thought about her in the comm session. The organized voice. The researcher's efficiency. The decision to call because she couldn't say nothing.
"The part of you," he said, "that knows things are wrong and can't leave them wrong. The part that walked into your family's archi
