“I know that he’s Layla Goetz-Middleton’s father,” she said. “But honestly, Maggie, I think he was so frantic when he found out.”

Steve Goetz had claimed complete ignorance of his daughter’s affair with the gallerist—an affair that dated back to when she was fifteen years old. “I regarded Nelson as a sharp guy, my daughter’s friend’s father. Not a dirtbag predator,” he’d told Alicia. “I’m heartbroken and sick.” Now Layla’s father just wanted his daughter home. With his excellent lawyer by her side.

“That’s not the only thing wrong with him,” I said.

“And I know he was obsessively collecting Kim Lord’s work before she died,” she said. “But so what? I think he’s just a completist.”

“A completist.”

“He’ll get this done,” said Yegina. “This museum will happen. And it can kill the Rocque or it can save it. I actually think he wants to save it. He’s very deferential to Janis. He’s even agreed to put ‘Goetz’ on his building, but not on the whole complex. For now, we’re calling it the Next Museum.”

“Until an even richer person comes along and pays for naming rights,” I said.

But as I gazed at my proud friend, who’d worked for years without proper acknowledgment and now was getting the break she deserved, I felt my resistance fading. After all, I was moving on, too. The run-down, shoestring, risk-taking Rocque as I’d known it had to end, and maybe this way was the best way.

“Tell me how you said yes to Hiro,” I said.

She smiled big again. “With lots of conditions.”

THE NEXT DAY, JANIS LED me out to a patio that looked down on her sculpture garden. On the slope below, I could see the Richard Serra ellipse, like a giant, tilted rusting paddock for exceptionally tall horses, and beyond it, the grove of trees where I’d almost died last spring. I was glad the hole in the earth was hidden from me.

My boss was altered. The navy suit was gone. She wore jeans and a collared white shirt that gaped on her, her dark eyes peering from a face that seemed glossier and more worn at once. I avoided looking at her chest. No matter how she downplayed the impending loss with sardonic humor, I couldn’t imagine losing my own breasts.

Janis lowered herself to her chair as if any moment she expected the furniture to fly out from under her. “Gigi will bring us some lemonade and cookies,” she said. “I hope that’s appealing. I actually don’t know what you like to eat. You abandoned that lunch I ordered for you at Café Francesca.”

“I love them both.” I couldn’t keep the choke from my voice. “And I’m really sorry.”