Wet hair slicked back, wrapped in an oversize towel that stretched to my ankles, my feet left damp blotches on the concrete as I scurried up the stairs. Three steps from the top, I could see that the box of Carey’s plans for the house was already gone.

I was about to swivel and make a beeline for the library when I heard Tyler’s voice.

“Whatcha doin’, gorgeous?” He was across the courtyard, pouring himself a cup of coffee outside our room and watching me run for the top floor.

“You’re awake!” I squeaked.

“Barely.” He frowned and blew on the coffee. “What’s on three?”

“I was going to check my email on Max’s computer,” I lied, panicking. “She went to pick that writer up from the train.”

“How’s the shower?”

“Extraordinary.”

“I’ll try it out. Go take advantage,” he said.

“Wh—what?” I stuttered.

“Of the internet?”

“Right.” I nodded, clutching at my towel. “The internet.”

“I’ll be out in five minutes. Want me to bring your clothes up?”

“That’s okay. I’ll come back for them,” I said, taking one long look at the library door and dragging myself into Max’s office instead. Dammit.

I didn’t give two shits about my email. It could have been deleted for all I cared. I exhaled and looked around.

Inside the floral cabinet of her work space, Max’s bleached-cedar desk held an enormous laptop and a glossy electric-blue folder from the Young Museum, but not much else. The ashtrays were empty, the coffee table bare. The bookshelf, however, still held the volumes I’d noticed at the party, and I laid them across the pink velvet and ran my fingers through their glossy pages.

All of them were artists who had somehow disappeared.

Dutch conceptualist Bas Jan Ader vanished in 1975 while attempting to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a one-man yacht, the Ocean Wave. The act of crossing was an art piece he titled In Search of the Miraculous, after a series of photographs. He managed to keep radio contact for three short weeks. His boat was found empty ten months later.

Hannah Wilke documented the changes in her body during the months preceding her death from lymphoma in a series of devastating photographs titled Intra-Venus, revealing the rampant destruction wrought by her chemotherapy and radiation treatments.

Charlotte Posenenske, a German minimalist, resigned from artistic practice in 1968 with a formal manifesto, the last lines of which read “I find it difficult to come to terms with the fact that art can contribute nothing to the solution of pressing social problems.”