In November 1965 Jay DeFeo was evicted from her home and studio at 2322 Fillmore Street in San Francisco, the epicenter of a vibrant community of Beat-adjacent artists, writers, and musicians. In a now-famous story, the artist hired a moving company to box up and haul off her massive painting, The Rose, which she had labored over since 1958. Eleven feet tall, nearly a foot thick with sculpted oil paint, wooden armatures, and earlier drafts, and weighing 1,800 pounds, The Rose had to be hoisted out of her second-floor window. When DeFeo vacated the apartment the following day, she left behind another work in progress—a comparatively slight painting, in oil on paper, stapled directly to the wall. The artist was only able to salvage a few roughly torn fragments from the scarred and stuccoed surface of Estocada, as the piece was titled (after a matador’s final murderous blow). Though The Rose spent decades languishing in storage and was only exhibited twice during the artist’s lifetime, the painting and its legend have come to define DeFeo’s career. Estocada’s story, on the other hand, has remained untold. But how does one write the story of an artwork that never really existed, unfinished …