Delacroix slid a folder across a very small table and said, “I want to show you something, and I want to say first that this is not a complaint about your daughter.”

Inside were drawings.

Gemma’s, from the winter — a series of family pictures done in the same assignment cycle, one a month.

In October there were four figures.

In December there were four figures, and one of them had been drawn much larger than the others and placed apart.

In February there were two figures, both small, in the corner of an otherwise empty page.

“I flagged it in January,” Mrs.