So she stepped out of her shoes — the black velvet again — onto the ledge, which now had a steel plate beneath it you would never find unless you lay on your back on the floor, the way her father used to. Elliot stepped up beside her. She lifted the star and was short, of course, by four inches.
His hands came up over hers. *Chock.*
Below them the plate cocked; above them the star released it; and out of the crown, slowly and then all at once, the little red-and-gold tower rose and lifted the star a foot higher and stopped. The gallery made a sound, a gasp and a laugh and something under both. Then Lucjan turned a brass key in the plinth, and for the first time since 2015 the whole pyramid began to turn — soldiers, angels, shepherds, the carved fir forest — slow and steady under the tower, like a promise kept.
Behind the little arcaded door there were three things now: Benedek's tube in fresh wax; the carved Liesl on her stepladder, keeping watch; and a second tube holding a copy of the brown sheet with a hundred and twelve names, and one line at the top in Roz's hand: *To the two who are reading this: we decided. Now it's your turn.*
They stepped down together. Hanne was crying into a tissue. Near the back, Oge opened a small paper bag she had carried all the way from Milwaukee.
"Ogechi," said Lucjan, warningly.
"The registrar said no *snow*," Oge said serenely. "Nobody said anything about stars."
She threw a handful into the air, and Gabriel threw a second, and the tiny silver stars went up into the blue window-light and came down turning, over the pyramid and the old woman in the wheelchair and the girl in scrubs and the shoe man in his three-piece suit, and over the two of them at the foot of the ledge.
Elliot reached out, slowly, so she could see him do it, and took one from her hair just above her ear.
"You missed one," he said.
She felt her smile turn careful, the way it had that night — and then go past careful into something she no longer had to guard.
"That," Roz said, "sounded dangerously sincere."
"It was," he said. "It is."
She took the little star from his fingers and tucked it into the breast pocket of his suit, where he would find it on the train that night and keep it for years, in a drawer, beside a pencil drawing of a boy at a lathe.
Behind them the pyramid went round in the blue dusk, the tower bright at its crown, its small door shut on what it held, waiting, the way its maker had built it to wait, for the next two people who would need it.