*I sold the pyramid in November to fund your severance. I didn't know this existed. Now I do. The museum will hear about it today, and it may put the sale at risk. I'm not going to decide this for you, because I don't think I'm allowed to anymore. Wednesday at eight, before we open, anyone who wants to come, meet in the rotunda. Whatever we decide, I'll carry it out. I'm sorry I don't have better news. I'm not sorry it was found.*
Some people cried. Some asked about money at once, and she answered precisely, because they deserved precision: without the sale, about two-thirds. Ferdie Lutz, who had sold wingtips at Achterberg's since 1985, asked if he could see the carved Liesl. Nadia Ostrowska in Alterations said, without looking up, "My mother ran the elevator in 1959. She used to talk about a Hungarian boy who ate all her pierogi," and kept sewing, and Roz had to step into the corridor.
Marisol Quiñones listened at the cosmetics counter with her arms folded tight across her black smock. She was twenty-nine, with immaculate brows and a son named Gabriel who did his homework in the lunchroom on Saturdays, and she had been the best at her counter for six of her seven years. She said nothing. She nodded once, hard, as if someone had told her the date of a surgery, and turned to restock a tray of lipsticks that didn't need it.
At 9:02 Roz's phone buzzed: *Sent.*
At 3:40 that afternoon, Corinne Waldegg called. The director of the Prairie Museum was a lean, white-haired woman with excellent scarves and a reputation for having saved her institution from bankruptcy by being unsentimental about everything except the objects.
"Thank you for not making us find it ourselves," she said. "Our counsel has read it. Legally, he thinks it's very probably nothing — donor intent with no named beneficiary. But it's countersigned by the owner, it describes a condition on disposal, and your warranty says no condition. He won't release funds with that in the file. Nor would I. My museum doesn't acquire objects over the objection of the people their makers gave them to."
"No one has objected. No one knew it existed until Saturday."
"Then I need a document that says so. From them."
"From whom? Who is *the floor*, Ms. Waldegg? The sixty-one people I employ today? Everyone since 1959? You want a release from a word."
"I want you to tell me who the floor is," Corinne said, not unkindly. "I suspect you're the only one who can find out. The fifteenth is the deadline, and I won't extend it; I have a board too." A pause. "And I've taken Mr. Varga off the project. He disclosed his family connection in September, and I allowed it, because I thought it would make him careful, and it did. But the object now holds a document in his grandfather's hand about who decides its fate, and he found it, with the seller, after hours, on a forbidden ledge. I don't think he did anything wrong. That isn't the same as having no conflict. He agreed before I finished the sentence, if that's any comfort."
It was no comfort. It was, she understood, the shape of the man.
She called him that night from her car in the empty staff lot, heater roaring.
"It's the right call," he said.
"I know it's the right call. That's what's so annoying about both of you."
He laughed, low and tired. "I'm sorry, Roz. Not for sending it. For the money."