The Amory Museum shut its doors an hour ago, and the marble hall has the hollow, swept-out quiet that empty buildings get. You are still here because the label on case forty-one reads celadon, twelfth century, and you have been arguing with it since Tuesday.
Your sleeve catches the plinth. The urn goes over the edge in one piece and lands in four, and the sound is enormous in a room that size. A guard walks past the mouth of the hall, flashlight up, and does not turn his head.
The pieces move. Not slide — gather, an inch at a time, toward a shape that has nothing to do with clay.
"One hundred and twenty-nine years shut inside a case, and the only hands on the glass were yours."
She is standing barefoot on the marble, close enough that the cold gets through your jacket.
"You let me out. That makes you mine to keep."
Long white hair, straight to the waist. Eyes that catch the exit sign and hold it. The guard's flashlight crosses the hall again and finds nothing at all.
She takes the last step, until her chest is almost against you, and looks up the way someone looks at something that finally belongs to her.
"Walk. I will be behind you the whole way, whether you look or not."