“Hudson, actually.” He wiped his brow with a blue handkerchief and gazed out to the truck. “It’ll be Brooklyn in another ten years. But when I was a kid, Hudson was a train stop and a river. Latchkey kids wandering around the rust and brick.”

“You sound like you miss it.”

“No,” he said with a frown. “I don’t miss it. But at least we learned not to wait around for someone else to do things for us.”

The reference was obvious, even though Layla and Zania, who’d acted so useless when the shoes came in, were out of sight. Pearson might have a country-club name, but, like Brenae, he saw himself as an outsider to the wealthier students.

“Why did you come to L.A.?” I said.

“Hal invited me,” he said, pride in his voice.

“You met him in Hudson?”

“I did actually. Back when I was too much of an idiot to understand that you didn’t just corner Hal Giroux and ask him to look at your art. Or to write to him repeatedly afterward. But he always wrote back. Sometimes just a couple of sentences, but always. Eventually . . . I applied to LAAC and here I am.”

The pause after the eventually—I wondered if that was when Pearson had been arrested for assault. I’d have to check with Ray. “Ever look back?” I said.

He shrugged. “Why did you come here?” he asked instead, examining me.

“To L.A.? Oh, partly running away, partly following somebody,” I said lightly. “You know.”

Pearson’s intense look did not waver, but his eyes grew softer and rounder. “Yeah,” he said after a moment. “I do know. Thanks again.”

Then he grabbed the box and started hauling it toward the gallery.

I stared after him, feeling as if I’d just run some difficult fitness test, my sweat-damp clothes sticking to me. I went to the restroom to salvage my makeup. When I spotted myself in the mirror, I recoiled at the redness of my cheeks. I looked like a kid at an August soccer practice again. But Pearson had revealed himself, just a crack, today. He noticed things about people. He was touchy about his working-class roots. He revered Hal. How had he felt about Brenae? I still couldn’t quite tell, but he held some emotion for her that he didn’t want known. He wasn’t the man in the video, though. That was Erik; I’d known that from the first time I laid eyes on both men.