She did not sleep.
She lay in her apartment on Prospect Avenue with the radiator knocking and did the arithmetic on the ceiling, as she had every night since August. Sixty-one employees. Two weeks' pay for every year of service, capped at twenty-six weeks, plus health coverage through July: the promise she had made in the lunchroom in September, once the building's sale to the county library system was final and there was nothing left to do but close well. The inventory liquidation, the fixtures auction, and everything she personally had came to seven hundred and forty thousand dollars. The promise came to one million, one hundred and thirty thousand. The Prairie Museum of Decorative Arts would pay three hundred and eighty-five thousand for the pyramid on removal, the twentieth of January, subject to its provenance and title review closing by the fifteenth.
She knew the clause by heart. She had negotiated it herself. *Seller warrants that it is aware of no claim, condition, or restriction on the object.*
At five-thirty she put on jeans and her father's old wool sweater and drove downtown in the dark.
Oge was finishing her shift in the security office off the loading dock, coat on, thermos in hand. She looked at Roz for a long moment and disarmed the main floor without being asked.
"You're going to go stand by it."
"I'm going to go stand by it."
"Mm." Oge put on her hat. "I was up all night, too. Every Christmas Eve for twenty-two years I walk the last ones out of this building. Shoe men. Gift-wrap girls. Pawlak and his crew, covered in glitter like a disco." She opened the door; the cold came in. "Nobody ever left me anything in a tower. It's a strange thing, to be left something. I'm not telling you what to do, Ms. Roz. I'm telling you I read it."
Roz took the folder from the safe and went down to the rotunda and stood before the pyramid in the grey light from the tall windows, and for a while she thought — clearly, calmly — about putting it back.
It would be easy. Two people on the ledge, the star, the tower, the little door. Elliot had photographs, and photographs were not the letter; who would weigh a photograph against a clean title? Oge would never say a word that hurt the floor. The money would come on the twentieth, and Marisol at the cosmetics counter would make her rent through July, and Ferdie Lutz in Men's Shoes would get his twenty-six weeks after forty-one years, and no one would be hurt by a sheet of paper going back into the dark where it had already slept for sixty-seven years.
Except that Benedek had put it there to be found when it was needed. And it had been found, by her, on the ledge she had been told never to stand on. And Oge had said *Then it's ours*, and Roz had heard her.
She was still standing there when Lucjan Pawlak came in through the staff door at seven, as he did every Sunday in December to check the windows before the families came.
He was seventy-one, small and broad, with a white mustache he had grown in 1979 and seen no reason to change, and he had worked in the display department since he was sixteen, when a Hungarian woodcarver with terrible English took one look at his hands and said, *You. You sweep one year, then I teach you.* He looked at Roz. He looked at the snow on the floor. He looked up at the pyramid's crown, at the faint new seam around the brass socket that no one but he and one other man alive would ever have noticed.
He sat down, quite suddenly, on a gold-wrapped gift box, which crumpled beneath him.
"So," he said. "Somebody stood on the ledge."