The pyramid left on the twentieth in eleven crates, and the receiving crew stood along the dock with their hands over their hearts, which nobody had planned. The money cleared. The severance went out whole on the twenty-sixth; the foundations' sixty thousand closed the last of the gap, and the remainder, at Ferdie's suggestion, was split among everyone with under five years. Marisol came up to the fifth floor, set a very expensive hand cream from her counter on Roz's desk without a word, and left.
Achterberg's closed at six on the thirty-first of January. The last customer bought the last pair of grey kid gloves and told the clerk she had bought her first pair at this counter in 1961 from a girl named Teodora. At six Roz locked the brass doors with her father's key. At a quarter past, off every schedule, Lucjan ran the snow machine one last time, a minute's sift of white over the bare marble where the pyramid had stood. Then people went home the way they do after the end of things, in twos and threes, saying *drive safe* and *see you* and not knowing when.
Oge was last but one. At the alarm panel she asked, "You want to do it?"
"No. It's yours. It always was."
Oge keyed the code without looking, and the panel went green to red, floor by floor. "He's out there, you know. Across the street since five. Told Pawlak you should get to close it without anybody next to you. Standing in the cold like a fool. Go out the front, Ms. Roz, before I have to explain him to the police."
He was under the streetlight across Wisconsin Avenue, snow on his shoulders. He didn't cross. He lifted one hand.
She crossed to him. "Walk with me," she said. "I don't want to go home yet."
They walked all the way to the lake.
VIII.
The following year, the first Sunday of Advent fell on the twenty-eighth of November.
The Prairie Museum gave the pyramid a high white gallery with tall windows over the Chicago River, and if Roz suspected Elliot of having something to do with the windows, she never asked. The letter hung to its left in a low-light case. Beside it ran a label nearly the length of the wall — a hundred and twelve names under plain capitals: GIVEN BY THE FLOOR OF ACHTERBERG'S, MILWAUKEE, 1918–2027. The registrar had wanted *donated*. The floor had said *given*. The floor had won.
They came down on a chartered bus Ferdie had paid for with six months of shoe-shine raffles at his church. Teodora, ninety-two, under a tartan blanket in her own grey kid gloves. Nadia and the Alterations women, who had opened a tailoring cooperative on Mitchell Street and were ruinously busy. Oge, retired, who said she had finally learned to sleep at night and found it overrated. Hanne, holding Roz's arm on the stairs and pretending it was for Roz's sake. Marisol, in blue scrubs straight from a clinical rotation, with Gabriel, who announced that the soldiers' faces were "kind of nice, actually," and was told by Lucjan that this had been the whole point.
Lucjan taught a Saturday woodturning class at the museum now, with a waiting list. He and Elliot had spent eleven months building the new drive: a slow, silent motor in a new oak plinth, brass gears cut in Cicero from Benedek's drawings, everything reversible, nothing original drilled. Roz worked for the city, helping the small shops on Wisconsin Avenue and Mitchell and Vliet not close at all, doing arithmetic in other people's stockrooms, and some of them were going to make it. The old rotunda was a library reading room. Where the pyramid had stood, a round oak table held, under glass, a photograph: the pyramid lit at night, snow on the floor, two sets of footprints going away into the dark, one bare and one in leather. Oge had taken it at 11:40 that night, before she said a word, and told no one until the library asked.
She and Elliot had been together, in the careful way she'd asked for, since a Sunday in March when she took the train to Chicago unannounced, turned up at the conservation lab with two coffees, and said, *Tell me the third thing.* He had, and the fourth, and he always had another. They rode the Hiawatha on alternating weekends, ninety miles of frozen fields, and for now that was exactly enough. *Go slowly,* she thought, watching them pass. *You'll get further.*
At four, as the light over the river turned blue, Corinne said a few short words and stepped aside. The floor had chosen its two by a vote of forty-one to nothing, in a group text called LEDGE, at Marisol's suggestion. Roz had tried to object and had been told, by a woman in nursing scrubs, that this one was not hers to decide.