Leon finds me before I find him, which is its own kind of answer. He's waiting by the staff entrance when my Thursday session ends, still in uniform, four years heavier in the face, and he's holding a single sheet of paper like it might blow away.
"You asked about this," he says, no greeting first. "The staff circular. From after. I kept my copy."
I didn't ask, not exactly. I'd only wondered aloud to Celia whether anything written at the time had mentioned the two of us by name, and apparently that wondering traveled. I take the paper. It's dated November 1990: two paragraphs about restoring visitor trust, nothing about the guards restrained against a basement bench while thirteen works disappeared.
"They thanked the docents," Leon says. "Thanked the board. One line about security review, like we were a procedure instead of people."
"I know." I hand it back. "I read every version of that story for a year before I stopped reading anything about this place at all."
"You stopped reading it because you left," Leon says, and there it is, the thing he's been carrying since I resigned without calling him first. "I didn't get to leave. I came back the next week because I had a mortgage, and you just—" He stops himself, folds the circular along its old crease. "I'm not saying you owed me anything."
"I think I did, a little." It costs me something to say it plainly instead of apologizing around the edges. "I was ashamed. Not of what happened to us. Of being seen after. I couldn't tell the difference between the two for a long time."
"There's something else," Leon says, and his voice drops the way it used to right before he'd tell me a donor had complained about something neither of us controlled. "After you left, they moved me to the east wing for a year. Told me it was scheduling. I think it was so visitors touring the gallery where it happened wouldn't have to look at the guard who'd been tied up in it."
I feel that one in my chest, a small ugly fact I never knew to ask about. "Nobody told me that."
"Why would they. You weren't here." He says it without the edge from before, just tired fact. "I'm not telling you now to make you feel it. I'm telling you because you asked what the circular didn't say, and that's part of what it didn't say."
"I'm glad you told me anyway."
Leon is quiet long enough that I think I've lost whatever this conversation was trying to become. "I'm not going to tell people it was fine," he says finally. "If Celia wants a staff voice for this exhibit, it won't be me saying it worked out."
"I won't speak for what happened to you," I say, "and I'd ask you not to speak for what happened to me. We were in the same room. We didn't have the same four years after."
He almost smiles, the first crack in four years of silence between us. "That's fair." He pockets the circular instead of giving it to me, and I understand that's not refusal, just a man keeping his own evidence close. We don't shake hands, but we agree, without saying so, to stand near each other in this instead of standing for each other.