For a year she had been getting me in the diminished form of my need — a lonely woman at the edge of her life, reaching.

And here, in this lot, she got the other version, the one I’d almost lost track of myself: a woman with a place and a people and a purpose, greeted from every direction, mid-laugh, mid-task, belonging.

Children carry their parents around as fixed portraits, and the portrait Deb had been carrying of me had gone gray and pleading over that first hard year, and I could not have painted over it with any amount of reassurance on the phone.

She had to see it.