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put his hands on his lover’s body.
    I pinched my fingers down on the rings, intending to wrench them from my hand, but they snagged on my knuckle. Or maybe, I let them snag. But one thing was for certain: If I took them off right now, I didn’t know when I would put them back on again. Or if I ever would.

4
    •
I re-read your letters the other day, & I will not believe that the man who wrote them did not feel them, & did not know enough of the woman to whom they were written to trust to her love & courage, rather than leave her to this aching uncertainty.
    —Edith Wharton to W. Morton Fullerton, August 26, 1908
    The suffocating numbness that had settled over me since I fled the gallery with Jonathan receded slightly on Monday morning, when I rounded the final hill on Route 2 that led into North Adams, where my museum was, and I saw the town with all its graceful steeples nestled against the mountains. Relief flooded me because, as I so often did when I saw that sight, I thought,
Yes.
Yes, this had been the right thing, the right place. The green ridges of the hills rose against swollen purple clouds that threatened rain, and the jumble of old factory buildings that made up the museum, all ruddy brick and huge creaky windows, sprawled along the Hoosic River where it ran through town. The steel letters of the museum’s name that jutted from the roofline filled me with pride, every time. I loved parking my car and knowing that, within an hour, the lot would start to fill as visitors arrived—to view exhibits I had developed, artwork I had helped to showcase. Since starting at MASS MoCA, I’d busted my ass to earn a reputation as a committed and incisive curator, and my confidence in my skill sustained me. And, better still, my work made sense. My work, I could trust.
    My artistic talent was modest. I knew it, had never not known it; even as a sixth grader I could tell that the drawings that my mother stuck to our fridge were nowhere near as good as those of my classmate Heisuke. Maybe I might have been second-best, but Heisuke was special. His work had
life
. With three quick twitches of his fingers, Heisuke could give you a bird, weightless on the wind; meanwhile, I could sketch for twenty minutes and produce a passable rendition of a pigeon in heart failure plunging from the sky.
    Predictably, Heisuke was admitted to the fine art program at LaGuardia High School, and, equally predictably, I was not. It frustrated me at first—that I should love artwork so much, yet remain mediocre at it despite diligent efforts at improvement. What changed everything was the day my ninth-grade class had a tour of MoMA led by a curator in a glamorously chunky turquoise necklace, and I realized that I could make a career out of loving art. Analyzing it, researching it, writing about it, but ultimately just loving it. So I took English classes at Stuyvesant instead of art classes, including the AP literature course where I met Adam. I got an art history degree from Williams, because it was the best program at a small college. PhD from Columbia, because Adam wanted to be back in New York. It had all made perfect sense, and it had all led me here.
    •
    On my way into the museum, I passed Natalie Jeremijenko’s
Tree Logic
installation in the front courtyard: six young trees suspended upside down in the air, planters and all, from a framework of cables and posts. A few of their trunks had started to curve upward over time, as if to say,
Wait a minute, something isn’t right here,
but even so, they leafed and turned color and thrived.
    I was lucky to have my very own office, with an eight-foot-high window set into a brick wall still mottled with eighty-year-old paint. My view looked past the small fork of the Hoosic that ran beneath my window, toward the hills that hemmed the town in to the north. Usually I loved to look out of that window, but I’d spent far too much time lately sinking into my thoughts; today I was grateful for the