"What stopped you?"
"Oge," he said. "*Not in anybody's coat pocket.*"
Despite everything, she almost smiled.
That night her mother made goulash, a joke from 1981 that had become, like most jokes in the Achterberg family, a tradition. Hanne Achterberg was sixty-eight, silver-bobbed, a retired actuary who had married into a department store and spent forty years quietly keeping it solvent with a pencil, and who had said since 2009 that Achterberg's should close while it could still close with dignity. She had been right. She had never once said so, and Roz loved her for it.
She read the photographs on Roz's phone twice. "Well," she said. "Liesl. I met her twice. Eighty-something, five feet tall, terrified your father." She took off her glasses. "He used the ladder because Liesl told his mother, and his mother told him: nobody on the ledge, because Mr. Varga said. He thought it was about the wood."
"Mama, what do I do?"
"The actuary says: put it in the file, let the lawyers be lawyers, pay the people. A letter doesn't pay rent, and Benedek Varga understood rent; he came here with a coat and a chisel." She paused. "And the woman who was married to your father for thirty-eight years says he would have stomped around for three days complaining about Hungarians and their towers, and then done the right thing. Slowly. Complaining."
"What's the right thing?"
"Oh, sweetheart. It isn't yours to say. That's the part you don't like."
Roz pushed her bowl away. "No. The part I don't like is that for six years I've been the only person allowed to decide anything in that building, because I thought that was what taking care of it meant. And a man I never met just reached out of 1959 and took the star out of my hand."
Hanne put her own hand over her daughter's.
"He didn't take it," she said. "He just made sure it took two."
V.
On Monday at seven-thirty, before the doors opened, Rosalind Achterberg went floor by floor.
She started at the loading dock, because that was where Benedek's first winter had started, and read the letter aloud in English to the five people on the receiving shift. Then Cosmetics and Fragrance. Hosiery, Gloves, Handbags. Men's Shoes. Alterations, where three women in their sixties listened without taking their feet off the treadles, because a hem is a hem. The tearoom kitchen. The office upstairs, last. Eleven times, and each time she said afterward the same words she had written down at four in the morning: