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going on in there?” asked Brian, gently lifting her dust mask over her head like a bridal veil.
    Sophie laced her hands across her stomach. “Just thinking about my parents. Wondering what they’d think of this place. But I guess it wasn’t really their thing, renovating.” Randall had always picked their apartments sight unseen, from the newspaper, based on some algorithm of price per square foot and distance from Maeve’s lab. It was the most efficient approach, Sophie knew—the quickest way to get them settled into whatever new place required Maeve’s services. Maximize lift, reduce drag. Maeve designed wings for commercial aircraft, and Randall freelanced, writing about consumer electronics. Sophie just followed in their slipstream.
    “It’s going to be beautiful,” Brian said. “I’m sure they would’ve been proud.” He brought her a cold bottle of water from the cooler, then went to the corner deli to buy sandwiches. They ate on the front stoop, butcher paper spread on their knees, and Brian filled Sophie’s silence with stories about the museum. He’d bought the Milan vase, but his boss, Ted, had gone by himself to give the news to the director, and Brian was sure Ted had taken credit for the whole thing. Also, the clean out of the storage room had stalled.
    “Conservation started getting everything ready to move to off-site storage, but they started having trouble matching the pieces with their object cards. So they need Michael to go through everything and figure out the cards, but of course Michael just left on his sabbatical.” Brian gave a little laugh and shook his head.
    “So they’ll just have to wait.”
    “Yeah. Except nobody told the art handlers, who kept coming every day and loading the stuff onto object carts. I didn’t say anything ’cause it’s all silver and crystal—not my domain. But stuff shouldn’t be sitting around in limbo like that. Michael’s going to have a conniption when he gets back.”
    Sophie had heard the stories about Michael’s fits of rage, usually provoked by mislabeled objects or misinformed art handlers. Ted, who was supposedly Michael’s boss, was known to take sick days during Michael’s more prolonged rampages. But Brian refused to be intimidated by his colleague, knowing that the majority of Michael’s fury was born of impotence. He’d never come close to actually getting anyone fired.
    “Where are they putting all the carts in the meantime?”
    “They crammed them into our offices because they have to be locked up at night, and they don’t all fit in the storage room. Don’t be surprised if you hear I’ve been found dead under a pile of candelabras.”
    “So what’s going to happen to it all?”
    “I’m sure it’s going to stay that way until Michael gets back. Conservation’s washed their hands of it, and anyway, they’re working twenty-four seven on the Dalí show now. Lord knows I don’t have time to deal with it.”
    This was classic Brian: placidly observing the chaos around him, unmoved by any urge to intervene. It wasn’t coldness, necessarily, or even arrogance. It was simply an ability to remain engrossed in his own work, letting others wring their hands over everything else.
    This suited Sophie’s temperament perfectly, of course—but she worried that over time their tendencies were becoming more exaggerated, her yin swelling along with his yang. She’d seen this in older couples, like Brian’s parents. His mother had always been talkative, his father reticent. But in their later years her chattiness metastasized into a nonstop monologue, while Brian’s father lapsed into complete silence.
    That was the risk, she supposed, in marrying the person who let you be your fullest self. No other man had been completely comfortable with Sophie’s insistence on picking up the check and carrying her own groceries, or her habit of disappearing on long road trips without telling anyone where she was going. With Brian she was