Out on New Bond Street, Storm fired through the doors of Sotheby’s like a missle. He didn’t believe what he was thinking. He didn’t dare to. He just ran—the way they’d taught him in high school track: legs stretching, body straight, elbows pistoning. The storefronts whipped by on either side of him, the store banners whipped over his head. People dodged out of his way, looked after him: in his fine suit, in his fine shoes, running as if the devil were on his tail. He didn’t think about it. He didn’t dare to think anything. He just ran.

He was at the Endering Gallery’s door in thirty seconds. Under the port awning, between the two spruces. Plastered to the glass like a bug on the windshield. He probed the dark interior over the fog his breath made on the door. The fog expanded, shrank as he panted. The gallery beyond was still. The front desk empty. The paintings undisturbed on the wall. Everything appropriate, right. He thought it was okay.

Then he lifted his eyes and saw her, seated on the balcony rail. He could make out the line of the belt around her neck.

Storm felt as if gasoline had been thrown on the smoldering coals inside him. Doubt, suspicion, anxiety all flared into a sudden blaze of fear. He grabbed the door handle, yanked. It was locked. He shook it.

“Damn!”

He let the handle go. Once, twice, he slapped the glass with both palms. He felt as if it were he up there with the noose around his neck.

“Sophia! Sophia!”

She didn’t hear him, didn’t react.

“Sophia!”

Storm clung to the smooth surface, powerless. She sat there another moment. He spun, his mind desperately empty, his eyes looking anywhere, for anything.

The spruce in the cast-iron planter. He bent down, seized the planter, lifted it into the air. It flew up too easily—for a moment he thought it would be too light to break the door’s thick glass. But that was the adrenaline: he was so jazzed, he could’ve lifted the building. He stepped back. Raised the tree, the planter, over his head. Dirt and cigarette butts poured down into his expensive haircut. He hurled the planter into the door and the door shattered.

The black cascade of soil and the white cascade of glass went blue as the gallery’s alarm light started flashing, as the siren started shrieking to the sky. Storm charged through the jagged opening. The shards of the door crackled under his feet. The planter was still tumbling to a stop as he leapt over it. He dashed for the stairway, shouting.

“Sophia!”

But she had already dropped off the railing. While he was lifting the planter into the air, she had done it. Her body hung jerking at the end of the belt.