Outside? he mouthed. I nodded.

The crowd was suffocating. I was pushing, shoving, squeezing to get through, as was everybody else, when I passed a room where Charles Eliot was holding court. “Well no, we had no idea,” he was saying to a group of people, looking elegantly disappointed. I paused, safe within a scrum of strangers, to watch him play this out.

“Isn’t it fraud?” someone demanded.

“There have to be damages. Right now—everything is fine. The work continues to hold its value.”

Helen Sprain stood behind him, back-to-back, so they could work the largest number of conversations in the smallest possible square footage. She was elegant, with soft red hair, hard black eyeglasses, and a slightly oversize mauve wool suit.

Charles said something out of the side of his mouth to Hen; she reached back and brushed his leg with one burgundy finger; he tapped her with his elbow and said a name; she leaned her hair into his and nodded in such a way that he could feel it—and all the while, they were carrying on multiple conversations with collectors, curators, artists, and the various personalities who had been issued a ticket. The Young Museum, I realized, was merely a venue. Eliot&Sprain had orchestrated everything: the work, the guest list, the timing—even, I realized, the seat assignments in the theater.

Charles and Helen symphonically directed the futures of Carey Logan and Maria Clarke. Two artists for the price of one. Max appeared at Charlie’s side, hand on her big belly, and he brushed his cheek against hers. Max smiled. Hen turned and hugged Max, like she loved her—motherly, almost—while Charles looked on, something haunting his elegant face.

Then I didn’t hear the noise in the room anymore, or feel the bodies shoving against mine. I thought only of Susan Bricklings-Young saying, the night of the turtle party, “He was so very in love with her. It was all so upsetting,” and I understood that she meant Charlie, and the breakup of his marriage. “She didn’t know what she had,” Susan said about Carey. Maria wanted to be with Charlie, but couldn’t, or wouldn’t, tell him the truth about herself. And so—he married Max, after six weeks of dating.

Charlie wasn’t Max’s prize, like I’d always thought. She was his consolation.

And with that, the spell was broken. It didn’t matter anymore, not to me, what Max and Charlie did to each other, because I never wanted to see either of them ever again.