The gallery is colder than I remember, or maybe I'm just older and colder myself. Celia walks me past two mockups set up on wheeled frames, white panels printed with paragraphs about the theft, about the eighty-one minutes, about the thirteen works by number and title.
"Visitors read this first," she says, "before they see anything empty. Context, then absence."
I stand in front of the panel and feel nothing it was built to make me feel. "This explains the hole. It doesn't show it." I nod toward the far wall, where four bare frames still hang, their nails and dust-shadows outlasting the paintings they held. "That's the thing people need to stand in front of. Not a paragraph telling them how to feel about it."
Celia's assistant, a young woman I don't know yet, wheels out a second mockup: the frames themselves, unglazed, lit the way they were lit on October thirteenth, nothing added, nothing explained beside them except a small card with each title and the words RECOVERY PENDING.
This is the one I like, and I don't bother hiding it. Celia opens her folder and hands me a photocopied room sketch, signed Edwin Vale. "Something else to look at before we decide," she says.
"Where did you find this," I ask, turning the photocopy toward the light. The handwriting crowds the margins the way mine used to crowd my old incident reports, like the writer was afraid of running out of room before running out of things that mattered.
"Collections archive. We catalog his correspondence same as anything else donated to the house." Celia watches me read instead of reading over my shoulder, which I notice and appreciate. "I pulled it last year for an anniversary piece that never ran. I'd forgotten it existed until this week."
"And you're sure he's talking about a room like this one. Not just filling space because he was cheap."
"He wasn't cheap," Celia says, almost defensive, and then catches herself. "I don't actually know what he was. I know what he wrote down. That's a different thing, and I'd rather not pretend otherwise to you of all people."
That lands harder than she probably intends. Four years of other people pretending to know things about my own eighty-one minutes that they couldn't actually know, and here's the one admitting the limits of her own evidence before I have to ask her to.
Celia studies both arrangements the way I used to study a circuit board, looking for the fault instead of the design. "Edwin was our founder," she says, indicating the sketch in my hands. "He drew this in 1897. It tells us where he wanted things, not what we have to do now."
I look at the sketch, at a name under the signature line I hadn't heard before today. Edwin Vale. Dead decades before either of us was born, arguing on paper about rooms neither of us will ever stand in the way he intended.
"He's not going to settle this for us," I say.
"No," Celia agrees, "but I'd like to know what he thought before I decide what we think." She folds the sketch back into the folder. "We'll test both. Panels in gallery two, empty frames alone in gallery four. I want to watch how long people actually stand in front of each."
It isn't agreement, not yet, but it's the first time since Monday that she's offered me a test instead of a decision already made, and I find I can work with that.