I wished I could ask Viridian about the Mathias poems, or Mathias himself, but I didn’t dare, didn’t want to risk upsetting her. I found more of his work online, and maybe it was the awfulness of his life, the waste of it, that made me shiver, reading it:

A room, a roaring room. Through the door, an enemy will come.

Are you ready? This dream

is your death foretold. The air in the room is the exact weight

of the brick thrown through the window

you neglected to account for.

And what about the lost poems, the ones Viridian was said to have? My guess, which turned out to be pretty good, had been that Doug wanted to get his hands on them for the magazine. He wanted the attention and the glory. I didn’t much like Doug or how he operated, but maybe the magazine would be a worthy home for Mathias’s work. And Doug had money, maybe he would pay Viridian a lot to publish them, what she needed, however much that was. I thought about how Viridian would hate my knowing even this much about her circumstances.

How much was a legacy of poems worth anyway? Was it the exact weight of a short life subtracted from a long one, the difference in years?

We crossed the bridge in silence and began our climb to the Heights. “You look nice,” I said to Aaron, mostly to be saying something. And he did. He wore a white open-collar shirt, gray jeans, and sandals. Casual casual casual, Doug had told me, and we’d done our best.

“So do you,” Aaron told me. I’d decided on a dark blue shirt with a pattern of sequins on one shoulder, and my best jeans. I’d put my hair up on top of my head and used two fancy picks, like chopsticks, to keep it there. I hoped I looked effortlessly and eccentrically chic, not just weird.

“How about, if the party’s awful, we can go somewhere else. One of the bars you like.”

“Yeah, sure.”

He still sounded grudging. I gave up. It wasn’t like I was making him go to court with me. I couldn’t help thinking that he’d liked me better, I’d been easier for him, before I had any new interests or enthusiasms. When I was aimless and adorably incompetent, and he had to keep giving me advice.

“Those stupid caterers,” Jonathan said. “They dumped everything off and left, and I don’t know what’s supposed to be heated, what’s cold, and what’s room temperature.”