Sitting on a Prospect Park bench just across Flatbush from the museum, Cyrus pulled out his phone, listened again to the voicemail message from Orkideh’s gallerist, Sang. She’d been married to the artist. They’d been in each other’s lives for decades. Why was she calling Cyrus on the day of her ex-wife’s death? How could she? Cyrus, who had known Orkideh for days, not decades, felt gutted. It was hard for him to do anything but tremble. How was Sang making phone calls, speaking in sentences?

Seneca said grief should last no longer than seven years. Anything more was indulgent. Nazim Hikmet said twentieth-century grief lasted at most a year. It dwindled like that. Maybe twenty-first-century grief had gotten down to a fraction of that fraction, just a few hours before it was supplanted by necessity. A death announcement you scrolled past on your phone, situated between ads for toilet tissue and cell phones. Everywhere around Cyrus, people walked with infuriating ease. The trees sprouted wet black scabs from their bark, and still the clouds hung above them, dutifully. He pressed the white rectangle with Sang’s number on his phone and she picked up on the fourth ring.

“Hello?” Her voice sounded weaker than it had on the voicemail. Lighter.

“Uh, hi. Is this Sang Linh?”

“Speaking?”

“Uhm. This is Cyrus Shams. I had a missed call—”

“Ahhh, Cyrus. Yes. I’ve been waiting to hear from you.”

He said nothing.

“Orkideh passed away, Cyrus. She…It was herself. She did it herself, her own terms.”

A dog leading a man on roller skates whooshed by. Cyrus’s throat felt cold. His father had always made him wear scarves, some old-world belief about sickness coming in through the neck.

“Can you hear me?” Sang asked. “Orkideh was, uh, the artist you’ve—”

“I know. Right. Yes, sorry. I mean, I’m sorry. I know. I was just at the museum.”

“Oh Cyrus. I’m sorry.” A pause on the line. Sang’s voice was airy, all downbreath. It was the voice of someone not often overcome by sentiment. She continued:

“She mentioned you’d been coming to see her? That you were working on a book?”

“Why?” asked Cyrus, more sharply than he’d intended.

“Pardon?”

“Why did she tell you about me?”

A pause.

“Those conversations meant a lot to her,” said Sang, finally. “I am—was. Er, I am her gallerist, but we were married for years.”

“I know, yeah. I’m sorry.”

Cyrus held the phone with one hand and used the other to rub his neck, trying to warm it.

“Oh? She told you about me?”

“Well, no,” Cyrus said, quietly. “But I’ve read about you and her online.”

Sang laughed. “Haha, that makes more sense,” she chuckled. “She wasn’t much for talking about her personal life. Or for looking back.”

“I’m sorry for your loss,” said Cyrus, because it was what one said.

“I’m sorry too,” Sang responded. They were both quiet for a moment. Then Sang said, “She lived for something. And she knew when she was done living. That’s not nothing.”

“I—” Cyrus began. His ears felt hot. It was a cold day, but the earth beneath his feet felt on fire. “Why are you calling me?” He quickly added: “I mean, why me specifically?”

“Ah, I don’t mean to be so mysterious. It’s hard, you know? I’m very mad at her.”

There was something pressing cold at Cyrus’s throat, something that made him feel dense and terrible, like a moon capsizing boat after boat. The unspeakable thing, an impossible thing. Cyrus wished to be swept away before he had to ask, before the desperate embarrassment of the question rising in his mind could find words. He wanted to be extinguished, a candle dropped in the snow. Cyrus closed his eyes for a moment, two. Opening them, finding himself still inside his self, he blurted—

“Was Orkideh my mother?” It came out of his mouth like a bullet shredding through porcelain, shattering the partition between him and a great unacceptable.

A beat. Another beat. Bundled-up people scuttled by, frozen trees throbbed. Then—

“How long have you known?” asked Sang.

“I didn’t,” said Cyrus.

Silence.

“She wanted to tell you, Cyrus. She wanted you to know. I think—I think she thought she had more time? Well, no, that’s not it. She knew it was coming. I—I’m sorry. I don’t know. I’m sorry.”

Cyrus said nothing. In the grass, a white woman rubbed an older white man’s shoulders. They both wore leather gloves. Black scabs roiling on the trees.

“I didn’t know,” Cyrus repeated.

“Roya told me she knew before you even told her your name,” Sang said. “She recognized you immediately, standing in line at the museum, all these years later. She hadn’t even known you were in America.”

“Roya,” said Cyrus. “Roya was my mother.”

“Where are you right now? Are you still in the city?”

Cyrus clicked around on his phone, away from the call and into his web browser. In his web browser, he called up pictures of Orkideh. The image search was mostly of her artwork but scattered throughout were pictures of the artist herself. Cyrus clicked one open with his thumb—an older picture, Orkideh looked maybe forty. She was wearing dark makeup around her eyes and the photograph had been taken from slightly above, drawing her eyes up to the lens, her lips pursing slightly, somewhere between interest and violence. He studied her eyes. They were deep black but flashed with a brightness, like they held tiny fish that turned to catch the light on their scales. An incitement. Cyrus looked for the Roya of his father’s wedding photo in her face. Then he looked for himself.

“Cyrus?” asked Sang, a barely audible voice, the phone pulled away from his ear. He put it back up to his head.

“Sorry, yeah. I’m still here. I’m right across from the museum. Prospect Park.”

Within a few minutes, Sang was driving to him.