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run ahead to look for the next one, and that when Jane rounded the bend in the path after her, Lily was gone.
    “Lily!” William turned away from Jane and shouted into the trees on the lake side of the trail. Jane tried to find her voice but when she called “Lily” it broke and fell because everything had suddenly gone wrong, and even if it turned out okay, even if Lily appeared magically exactly where she ought to be, Jane had messed up and William had seen that she wasn’t a good sitter, that she had let him down.
    “Lily!” William shouted again, starting down the slope to the lake, losing his footing and sliding a few feet. He picked himself up andripped off his jacket, untied the canvas bags from his waist, tossing them up toward Jane, moving down along the bramble recklessly, panic in his voice, shouting, “Lily!” again and again, tripping in the underbrush, losing and regaining his footing. Then suddenly he was shouting, “Come out now!”—angry, as if this were a game Lily was playing, hiding somewhere close, crouching down in a patch of sage and staying very still. He was gone whole minutes, his shouts coming up over the verge to where Jane stood.
    When his calls grew distant, Jane walked toward the trail edge, picked up his jacket and gripped it in her hands. The bird sounds were louder, William’s voice barely audible, coming from back toward the lake. And then, there was nothing. It was there, in that span of time, that Jane allowed herself to imagine that he’d found her, that Lily was standing at the edge of the trail next to some post they’d already passed, that he was scooping her up in his arms that very instant and that she was saying the number, smiling fiercely at him and telling him to shout hooray.
    Up ahead the woman with the collie reappeared. She’d turned around, and her dog was limping. A breeze sifted between them off the lake and lifted Jane’s hair ever so slightly; she felt it brush against her skin just as she heard William’s voice again, his distant shouts drifting up toward the spot on the path where she stood. The woman heard them too and began to walk quickly toward Jane, a look of concern on her face. William’s voice coming closer and closer, Lily’s name arcing through the boughs of the trees.

4
    The tea set that Jane thought about first thing this morning when the shop’s alarm was blaring is sitting on a trolley beside her worktable. Gareth had stopped by right after she arrived to ask if she’d completed the exit forms, and Jane had lifted the Grainger file off the stack on her desk to show him that she was working on it. The set, one of the museum’s most beautiful, consists of twenty-one pieces of china. The teapot and matching cups and saucers are a light green with gold leaf, each with an ivy band painted so precisely that it’s hard for Jane to look at the set without imagining the delicate wrist and steady hand of the artist. The Grainger, like the rest of the ceramic collection, was auctioned off last week, and Jane is supposed to have its deaccession complete so that the conservation department can pack it for shipping. But even now, lifting a teacup off its padding to check its catalogue number, she feels reluctant. She wonders if this is what it’s like to lose the things you love in a burglary or house fire, is grateful that she’s allowed to touch everything one last time.
    Given the tastes of the day the Grainger tea set is relatively plain. It once belonged to a Duchess who was quite active in the Victorian landpreservation movement, who liked to call herself a friend to nature. She didn’t mind when the rose bushes grew too close to the windows, tolerated her husband’s hound under the table, accepted his penchant for stag-horn furniture. Before washdays, she often let her girls run from the grounds into the house without taking their boots off, though she sometimes complained in her diaries about the mess. She had both a rigorous mind