“I’ve seen too many careers snuffed out too soon,” said Lynne. She looked at me soberly, and I knew we were both thinking of Kim Lord and the little office far below us where her body had been struck down. “I stay sane by focusing on the living. And this place.” She patted the plain, off-white wall of our conference room. “Well, maybe not this room,” she added. “It needs something, doesn’t it? It’s needed something for years . . .” She trailed off, but her valedictory tone was clear.

“Do you think the Rocque will survive?” I said.

“The more important question is: Will the art survive? And who will continue to shape its meaning?” said Lynne. She clasped her notes to her chest and swept past me, trailing the faint smell of bergamot. “Good to see you back. I can’t stand this crackpot place without a few sane people.”

YEGINA’S BOYFRIEND, HIRO, CAME BY my office at the end of the day, his clothes rumpled, his eyes caved in by jet lag, and perhaps by tears. I motioned for him to sit down. His appearance worried me. With his broad shoulders and slow smile, Hiro was handsome in a warm, reassuring way. But today he exuded edginess and discontent.

“Don’t tell her I was here,” he said. “But I just want to understand: Is it me? She would tell you if it was me, wouldn’t she?”

“It’s not you,” I said. “It’s the timing. You rushed her.”

How could I explain—if Yegina hadn’t already—all the ways she’d tried to keep her last marriage alive: therapists, retreats, partial separations, even an open relationship, and that her ex-husband had taken advantage of every one, and her bank account, until exhaustion had finally broken her.

Hiro stood up and began flipping through a catalog of Warhol screen prints on my windowsill. “I thought she would be happy. Now that she’s not—I don’t know.”

“Give her some space. Let her decide what her happiness is.”

His hand on the open book, Hiro gazed out my window to the concert hall that was titanium-paneled now, almost finished. The sides gleamed, curving and whitening the sunlight. “What’s that movie where the guy decides to wait outside a girl’s window for a hundred days and if she doesn’t come out to him, he’s gone forever?” he said to the view. “And it rains on him and everything, and she doesn’t come out. She just watches him suffer. Finally, one night, he goes. I didn’t like him leaving. I always thought true love shouldn’t have a condition. One hundred days. What kind of love expires in one hundred days?” He paused for a long time, so long that I thought he was done speaking.

“Maybe—”