“You’re welcome to borrow these, if you want.”

“That’s okay,” I said. “They’re heavy, and my fingers are always covered in paint. Pictures and notes will do for now.”

“Sure thing. I’ll knock again in a bit.”

The moment he closed the door, I snapped my eyes up to the Carey shelf, where, thankfully, nothing poked out. Then I wondered, far too late, if there were any cameras in here. I moved my head slowly, trying to seem casual, and found the security-pod bumps dotting the ceiling. Once I saw their encasements—opaque white lenses—I breathed a sigh of relief. Motion detectors. Not cameras.

Still—I didn’t quite dare climb the ladder again, not all the way to the top, anyway. I took one picture of the spines before shame washed over me in a choking wave: This wasn’t my property, and this wasn’t my house. If I was caught trespassing like this, it would ruin an important professional relationship. I didn’t want Charlie to perceive me negatively.

I assured myself that Charlie hadn’t seen anything amiss, that if he had, he certainly wouldn’t have invited me to dinner. I returned to work, distracting myself with the Still, di Bondone, and Moholy-Nagy books, taking photos and notes whenever I found a passage that described a material process that intrigued me: Still’s original rabbit’s-foot glue recipe, an elaboration on the chemical properties of lime as a binding agent when painting a fresco on wet plaster, what the original material used in the development of cliché-verre—a cameraless, hand-applied early variant of photography—had been (smoke from a kerosene lantern). I tried not to think about what I’d been doing up on the ladder; it brought up an equal measure of curiosity and disgrace that made my stomach roil. By the time Charlie knocked, I was officially starving.

“Finished!” I called out.

“Dinner’s on the second-floor balcony,” he said, and I nodded before returning the books to their correct positions on the shelf and cleaning up the table I’d been using. My feet practically floated up the steps to find that Charlie—sweet, good Charlie—had set a beautiful table for two on the balcony outside his office, with a decanted bottle of wine, roast duck, heaps of steaming vegetables, even a fresh bunch of tulips in a pale green ceramic vase. On the edge of the deck, a red plastic sugar feeder hanging from a thick brown sailor’s rope was crowded with hummingbirds, buzzing in the air like oversize wasps.