He reached out — slowly, so she could see him do it — and took something from just above her ear. He held it up between finger and thumb: a tiny silver star, flat as a sequin, catching the pyramid's light.
"You missed one," he said.
She looked at the star, and then at him, and her smile changed into something more careful.
"That," she said, "sounded dangerously sincere."
He didn't answer. Somewhere in the building a relay thunked, and the great chandeliers of the rotunda went out, tier by tier, then the sconces, then the gallery lights, until there was only the warm glow of the pyramid's candles and the scattered little trees and the blue of the streetlights pouring through the tall windows across the snow-dusted floor.
"Looks like security forgot us," Elliot said.
"Security didn't forget anybody. Security is a woman named Ogechi Nwachukwu, who has worked nights here for twenty-two years, and that was her telling me to go home." Roz picked up her shoes. She did not put them on. "At eleven-forty she arms the motion sensors on this floor. If anyone is standing in the rotunda when she does, the system calls the monitoring company, the monitoring company calls the police, and Oge has to stand on the sidewalk explaining me to two officers. She has made me swear I will never make her do that again."
She looked up at the tower. Red and gold, perfect, impossible. Her father had stood beside this thing every December of his life and never known it was there.
"You wrote forty-one pages about this pyramid," she said, "and you didn't mention that."
"It isn't in any drawing the museum has."
"So you don't know what it is."
"No," he said. "But I'd like to."
She stepped off the edge of the light and into the dark of the store, barefoot, her shoes hanging from two fingers.
"Then you have twenty minutes," she said over her shoulder, "to prove you're useful."
He followed her. Behind them, in the empty rotunda, the pyramid stood alone in its own glow, the little tower bright at its crown, snow still sifting down through the dark like something being slowly remembered.
II.