The cost sheet is three pages, stapled crooked, and Celia doesn't hand it to me so much as drop it in front of me and let it make her argument before she says a word. Insurance assessment fees. Frame conservation estimates she canceled twice and reinstated once. A donor letter, unsigned, asking politely whether the museum intends to remain a going concern.
"This is why I keep wanting to fill the walls," she says. "A full gallery reads as stable. An empty one reads as a museum that can't afford its own collection, and in this budget that's not a metaphor, that's next year's fundraising letter writing itself."
"I know what it costs you to leave them empty," I say. "I'm not pretending otherwise. I'm asking you to look at what it costs to pretend they're not."
I've brought the empty-frame mockup again, its corners worn soft. Beside it is a new proposal Celia had sent over after our panel tests: careful reproductions filling the gaps, the gallery looking whole from the doorway. Her cost sheet lies between that version and mine, with its bare frames and separate factual cards.
Celia walks the length of the table, looking at one, then the other, then back, the way she's done every day since Tuesday, except this time she stops instead of starting the loop again. "Walk me through the frames one more time," she says. "Not the argument. The experience. What does a visitor actually feel standing in that room?"
I walk her toward the bare frames. "First they see the gap," I say. "Then they can choose to read. We don't give them the explanation before they've noticed what's gone." Celia stops at the Harbor study space, tapping the cost sheet against her palm.
"Here's my actual problem," she says finally, turning back toward the table. "Page two. Line four." She finds it and turns the sheet so I can read it myself: conservation framing, contracted, non-refundable, a number that's already been spent on new backing boards and UV glass for frames that, if we go empty, will be holding nothing but a date card. "I already paid to protect thirteen pieces of empty space. If the board asks why, 'because it felt more honest' isn't going to make that line disappear."
"It doesn't have to disappear," I say. "It has to mean something different than you're letting it mean. You didn't pay to protect empty space. You paid to protect the frames themselves, Vale's frames, from the nineteen-tens, because they're part of the collection whether or not what they held comes back. That's not a wasted line item. That's the museum doing its job on the one part of this it can still control."
Celia reads the line again like she's testing whether my version holds its shape under her own skepticism. "That's a generous read of a bill I didn't expect to be defending in October."
"It's not generous, it's accurate," I say. "You conserved the frames. The frames are here. That's the whole claim."
She sets the sheet down, not dismissively this time, more like she's filing it under a different heading in her head. "The board's not going to ask about frame conservation," she says slowly. "They're going to ask why we didn't just buy reproductions for less than we spent on backing boards for nothing. That's the question I actually have to answer Thursday, and 'Mara thinks it's more honest' isn't going to survive that room without something behind it."
"Then give them the letter as context, not permission," I say. "In 1903 he faced a temporary gap and chose not to disguise it. Ours isn't temporary in any way we can promise. The decision is still yours, but you can show the board that an honest gap isn't foreign to this collection."
That lands differently than anything I've said all week, I can tell, because she picks the mockup back up and looks at it the way you look at something you're about to have to defend out loud to people who weren't in the room for the argument that convinced you.
I point to the third frame. "Here's where the harbor study hung. A reproduction can make the room look whole from the doorway. The empty frame won't. Put Edwin's letter nearby, with its own date and the explanation that it concerned a different work, away on loan. Visitors can see the connection without being told the losses are the same."
"That's not comfortable," Celia says.
"No. But comfortable is what got us a label that blamed me for everything between the door and the loss. I'd rather be uncomfortable and accurate than comfortable and wrong."
She's quiet a long moment, flipping back to the cost sheet like it might have changed in the last five minutes. "If I approve this, I'm telling the board we chose the harder read on purpose, during a year we can least afford hard reads."
"You're telling them the museum trusts its visitors to handle an honest room," I say. "That's not nothing, as a pitch to a donor either."
Celia looks at me for a second like she's deciding whether I believe that or I'm just handing her a line to use upstairs. I think I do believe it, mostly. She picks up her pen, the same one from yesterday, and initials the bottom corner of the empty-frame mockup without any more ceremony than that. "Gallery four, empty frames, Edwin's letter, your corrected label," she says. "That's what opens Friday. I'm not pretending I love the math on it."
"You don't have to love it," I say. "You just have to hang it."
She almost smiles at that, the first unguarded thing her face has done all week, and slides the cost sheet off the table into the recycling bin like she's decided it already argued its case as hard as it's going to.