The meeting is in Celia's office, not the gallery, eight days after, just the three of us and a pot of coffee no one drinks. Celia has a different legal pad now, cleaner, fewer corrections, which somehow makes it worse to look at than the first one.
'We're reopening the undamaged wings in stages,' she says. 'Press will be here for the first one. I'd like to ask you to stay away from that, Mara. Not forever. Just that day, and maybe the week around it.'
'Why just me,' I say, though I already know the shape of the answer before she gives it.
'Because the question everyone's going to ask, the only question, really, is how they got in,' she says. 'And the answer to that question has your name attached to a door you opened. I don't think you did anything wrong. I need you to hear that part. But I can't control what a reporter does with a guard standing in a photograph behind a reopening ribbon.'
Leon sets his coffee down hard enough that it isn't quite a slam. 'She logged the time. They answered her hesitation with a lie about dispatch, then put us both on the floor. If you're telling the story, tell that part too.'
'I know that, Leon.'
'Then say it like you know it. Don't just manage around it.'
Celia doesn't flinch from him, which I notice even through the roaring in my own ears. 'I'm not asking her to agree she did something wrong. I'm asking her to let the story be quiet for one week while the museum tries to look like a place people can trust again. That's a different thing than blame, even if it doesn't feel different from where you're sitting.'
I believe her, mostly. I think she believes herself. And I also understand, sitting there with my hands around a coffee cup I'm not drinking either, that it doesn't matter whether it's blame if it does the same work blame would do, which is to make me the detail everyone has to step around to get to the good news.
'One week,' I say. 'Fine.'
It isn't one week. It's never going to be one week, and some part of me knows that the moment I say it, watching Celia's shoulders come down half an inch with relief she doesn't bother hiding. I go home that night and sit at my kitchen table and write out, on a page torn from a spiral notebook, everything true about what happened at that door: the time I logged, the voice that said dispatch is already aware, the badge I couldn't read. It is a complete and honest accounting, and it does not make me feel one particle better, because the shame I'm carrying was never about whether the account was honest. It's about the half-second between hearing dispatch is already aware and opening the door anyway, a half-second no document can undo.
I call Celia the following Monday and tell her I won't be back for the reopening, or the one after that, or, though I don't say this part out loud, probably at all. She asks if I'm sure. I tell her I am, because by then saying anything else would mean explaining a feeling I can't make sound like a reason.
Leon calls that same week, twice, and I let both calls go to the machine, not because I don't want to hear his voice but because I don't yet know how to be the person on the other end of it, the one who left rather than the one who stayed.