Sacha cleared her throat. “She loved him. She felt sorry for him. I expect he bullied her. I expect she allowed herself to be bullied. Love is complicated.”

Or sometimes, I thought, it wasn’t even love. Viridian had called herself foolish and weak, and I hadn’t understood her then, but I thought I did now. She’d given a part of herself up for love, and the whole long rest of her life was an effort to get it back.

Doug put his head in his hands. “So there really aren’t any Mathias poems. Congratulations, you just knocked the bottom out of the market.”

I said, “I don’t think so.” I turned to Ed. I trusted him more than the others. If I could get him on my side, there was hope. “I think the truth makes for a better story.”

It took time to bring everybody around to an agreement. They finally realized how much attention, how much uproar and publicity there would be, as people argued for their own interpretations of the poems and how they came to be. It was a full month of negotiations, phone calls, all while Viridian just breathed, while everyone wrestled for a part of what she left, good intentions or not. Here’s what was worked out, finally: Larry Nagel would purchase the poems from Boone, once Boone had legal possession. He would house them in his museum and sponsor exhibitions and allow scholars access to them. Doug and Compass Points would have first publication rights. Of course, there would be a book somewhere down the line. Sacha still had her television contacts from appearances about her Frankenstein project. Who knew what might be possible?

It wasn’t all sweet harmony, of course, people being people and writers being writers. There was a lot of squabbling about the valuation of the poems, and even when that was settled, Larry dragged his feet on the payouts. Ed and Doug eventually split up. A month later, when the poems went on display, and they went out into the world, some critics, the professional doubters, were unconvinced that Viridian had any hand in Mathias’s work. The second-wave feminists argued with the third-wave feminists over whether adopting a male persona was a betrayal of self, or no big deal.

Whenever you could see the personalities behind literature, there was a lot more interest in it. Weren’t people still arguing about who Emily Dickinson wrote her love poems for?

When Viridian slipped away the following summer, there was already a lively public conversation in progress. And it was possible that, somewhere out there, people who had never given a thought to poetry might now consider it worth their attention. So that a life spent in the service of art continued to nourish it after death.