On that first day of work, Declan walked into the Renwick Gallery and stood inside an installation that had taken over the second floor around the grand staircase. Tens of thousands of black threads had been installed at points all along the ceiling, tangling around the Villareal LED sculpture that normally lit the room, snarling the railing over the stairs, blocking out the light from the tall arches that bordered the walls, turning the walkways into dark, confusing rabbit tunnels. Museumgoers had to pick their way through with caution lest they be snared and bring the entire world down with them.

He had, bizarrely, felt tears burning the corners of his eyes.

Before that, he hadn’t understood that his goals and what he wanted might not be the same thing.

This was where he’d found art.

Declan stood in the small Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, looking at John Singer Sargent’s El Jaleo. The dim room, the so-called Spanish Cloister, was long and skinny. The walls were colorful with complicated Mexican tiles and lined with stone fountains and basins. El Jaleo was the only painting in the room, hung in a shallow alcove framed by a Moorish arch. Antique pots rested around its base, tricking the viewer into believing themselves part of the scene in the painting. A cunning mirror stole light from the hall and threw it subtly on the canvas. Gardner had renovated this room especially for El Jaleo, and every part of it was an extension of the painting’s mood.

The larger a piece of art was, the farther away one was generally meant to stand from it, so Declan was not directly in front of the canvas but rather standing four yards off. He was just looking at it. He had been looking at it for ten minutes. He would probably look at it for another ten minutes.

A tear prickled his eye.

“A man in Florence once had a heart attack when he saw the Birth of Venus, if you can believe it,” said a voice beside him. “Palpitations are more common, though. That’s what Stendhal had. Couldn’t walk, he reported, after seeing a particularly moving work of art. And Jung! Jung decided it was too dangerous to visit Pompeii in his old age because the feeling—the feeling of all that art and history round him, it might kill him. Jerusalem … Tourists in Jerusalem sometimes wrap themselves in hotel bedsheets. To become works of art themselves, you know? Part of history. A collective unconscious toga party. One lady in the holy city decided she was giving birth to God’s son. She wasn’t even pregnant, before you ask. Funny what art will do to you. Stendhal Syndrome, they call it, after our lad with the palpitations, though I prefer its more modern name: Declan Lynch.”

“Hello, Jordan,” Declan said.