"Who's been dead since 1983."
"I know. I'm not a lawyer. Legally it's probably nothing. But my job is that the object tells the truth. That's the whole job. If I start choosing which truths are convenient—"
"Sixty-one people."
"I know."
"Stop saying you know. You've never stood in a lunchroom and told sixty-one people what you could promise them and then gone home and done the math in the dark to make sure it was true. You go back to Chicago to a salary and a glass room. Marisol Quiñones has a nine-year-old and a lease and an acceptance letter from the nursing program at Alverno that she's carried in her apron for a month."
He was quiet. When he spoke, his voice was very even.
"You're right. I haven't done that. And I do go back to Chicago." He set the untouched coffee on a plinth beside a small lit tree. "But you already know I'm going to report it, because you would. You stood up last night and said a store is a promise you make to a street. My grandfather made a promise too. I won't be the one who decides his doesn't count because yours is more expensive."
It was the cruelest thing anyone had said to her in a year, and it was not cruel at all, and she hated that she could tell the difference.
"When?"
"Monday, nine a.m. I'm telling you now so you can do whatever you're going to do first, and so it doesn't come at you from someone else."
"Is that supposed to be a kindness?"
"It's the only one I have," he said, "that isn't a lie."
She drank her coffee. It was exactly how she took it; he must have asked someone at the gala. That made it worse.
"I came in at six," she said at last. "I stood here with it. I thought about putting it back and letting your photographs be photographs."
"I thought about it too. On the drive to the hotel. For about a mile."