Celia finds me on a Tuesday afternoon in late November, in the hardware aisle of the shop where I've been fixing small appliances since leaving the museum: toasters and radios and one memorable kitchen mixer brought in wrapped in a towel like it was injured. She's wearing a coat too good for this part of town, and she looks like she's rehearsed what she's about to say.
She hands me a folded notice, the kind mailed to museums and galleries, printed with the museum's seal at the top. Reward, it says, up to ten million dollars for return of the stolen art in good condition. Below that is a contact number, followed by the thirteen works' titles.
'I wanted you to hear the number from me before you saw it in a paper,' she says. 'I thought it might feel like news. Like an ending.'
'Does it feel like one to you?'
She considers that longer than I expect. 'No,' she says. 'It feels like a door we're required to leave open. The board wanted a bigger number. I talked them down to this one because I didn't want people doing arithmetic on human weakness and getting a worse answer than ten million.'
Owen Rusk is with her, parked outside in a department car, and he comes in once Celia waves him over, stamping cold off his shoes onto the shop mat. 'I want to be straight with you,' he says. 'This notice doesn't mean we know something new. It means the trail's gone quiet enough that the museum and its counsel think a public number might shake something loose that a private investigation couldn't. I can't promise you it'll work. I can tell you we're still looking, every week, same as October.'
I fold the notice back along its own creases while they watch me do it, and I think about the version of myself who might have taken this as a sign to go all in, to quit the shop, to spend my days writing letters to auction houses and dealers, to make finding those thirteen paintings the project that finally earns back the thing I lost in that hallway with the brass plaque. It would be a kind of penance dressed up as hope, and for about the length of one slow breath I actually consider it.
Then I think of Leon's voice in the dark asking me which painting I'd fix first, and my own answer, the back door lock, the small true thing instead of the big impossible one, and I understand what I actually want, which is smaller and steadier than ten million dollars and does not require any museum's gratitude to be worth having.
'I hope it works,' I tell Owen, and I mean it without reservation, the way you can mean something you've decided not to carry yourself. 'I've got a mixer to finish by five.'
Celia almost smiles at that, the first unguarded thing I've seen on her face since the gallery with the pale rectangles. 'If anything changes,' she says, 'I'll call you before it's in a paper. That much I can promise.'
I believe she means it, and I find, folding the hardware-aisle receipt into my pocket next to the museum's impossible number, that belief is enough for today. The paintings are still gone. The eighty-one minutes still happened. But effort, I'm learning, doesn't need a guaranteed ending to be worth continuing, mine or theirs, and for now that's the only arithmetic I plan on doing.