At the last exhibit in New York, Henry and Addie trade in their blue rubber bands and enter a plexiglass maze where a suspended sign reads YOU ARE THE ART. Bowls of neon paint line the aisles, and the clear walls are already crowded with signatures, patterns, and handprints.

Addie dips a finger in green paint and begins drawing a spiral, but the first loops vanish as she continues, erasing themselves as if they were never there. Henry notices the sadness she tries not to show and chooses not to ask how she endures it.

Henry dips his hand into the paint and asks Addie to put her hand over his. With her palm pressed to the back of his hand, Addie guides his finger to the glass and makes a single green line. Both of them wait for it to disappear, but it stays, and the permanence shocks Addie into breathless laughter.

Keeping her hand on Henry’s, Addie draws urgently for the first time in centuries, spilling out birds, trees, a garden, a workshop, a city, and a pair of eyes while she cries and laughs at once. Then, carefully and letter by letter, she uses Henry’s hand to write her name on the glass: Addie LaRue. Even when she smears the paint with her fingers, the name restores itself, unchanged.

Transformed by the realization that something of her can remain, Addie pulls Henry out of the exhibit and rushes them home to Brooklyn, gripping his paint-stained hand the whole way. In the bedroom she thrusts a blue notebook and pen into Henry’s hands and demands he do it again; Henry writes Addie LaRue on the blank page, and the name stays. Addie steadies herself and tells him, “This is how it starts,” and Henry begins to write.