The worst part of that day was not the police. It was being forbidden to touch anything.
After Sofia Brandt was walked out to a patrol car, my garden became a scene, and scenes have rules. The fragments had to stay where they had fallen until every piece was photographed, flagged, and documented from angles I had already seen once on a small bright screen. Nobody could pick up the head. Nobody could stand the arm back where it belonged. I asked twice, which I am not proud of, and was told twice, kindly, that I understood perfectly well why not.
So my mother's garden sat there looking like the aftermath of a small war. Yellow markers in the ivy. The bronze head face-up beside the lavender with a numbered card beside it, like evidence at a trial, which is of course exactly what it was. One of the Reader's hands lay palm-up under a broken fern. The book had split away from her lap and lay in two pieces on the stones.
I kept wanting to gather her up. It is an absurd instinct, with a fifty-year-old bronze β she did not need gathering. I needed it. There is a part of your brain that still believes that if you can only get all the pieces into one safe place, the thing is not really broken. It is only scattered.
Dr. Laura Bennett from the museum arrived that afternoon with Dr. Grace Nolan, because I had called Laura from my kitchen table with my voice doing something embarrassing, and she had said, "We're coming now," before I finished the sentence.
Grace is a bronze conservator, a calm, dry woman in her sixties with silver hair cut short and the habit of looking at damaged things the way good doctors look at X-rays β without flinching, and without lying to you. She walked the edge of the scene with her hands clasped behind her back, not touching, only looking, for a long time.
Then she stopped walking.
"Thomas," she said. "I'm sorry."
That was when it finally landed on me. All morning it had been procedure: passwords, timelines, tape colors, attic facts waiting their turn. Adrenaline had been converting everything into paperwork. Now a kind woman stood in my ruined garden and said she was sorry, and I sat down on the bench β the bench my mother used to sit on every evening after my father died, facing the Reader β and put my face in my hands and wept like a boy whose mother was dead again, because in a way she was. They had killed something of hers on purpose, for business reasons, and there was nobody left to tell.
Laura sat down beside me and did not say anything at all, which I have since decided is the most professional thing anyone did that day.
Eventually Grace crouched down near the broken base. Officers had finished with that section, and she had permission, and gloves, and a flashlight from her case. She had examined the Reader before, spent three hours on her once, photographed the underside of the base as best she could with the statue standing. There had been a foundry mark under there, she had told me then β half-hidden by fifty years of corrosion and garden grime, photographed only imperfectly, a few letters and a shape she could not fully read.
The break had changed that. The base had split and turned as it fell, and now a whole section of the underside that had faced the earth since before I was born lay open to the light.
Grace went very still.
"Thomas," she said. "Come here. Carefully. Don't step inside the tape."
I crouched beside her in the mulch. She aimed the flashlight along the broken edge, and there it was: the foundry mark, exposed by the fracture, nearly whole. Letters. A number. A small stamped device I had never seen, sitting in clean bronze where the break had sheared through the corrosion like a knife through rind.
"You photographed this before," I said.
"Part of it," Grace said. "Maybe a third of it. I guessed at the rest, and I don't put guesses in reports." She sat back on her heels and looked at me, and something in her face had changed completely. "Thomas. This is original."
"You're sure?"
"I was careful before," she said. "I'll be careful in the report too. But standing here β I'm far more sure than I was yesterday. This is a lifetime cast. This is Holloway's foundry, in Holloway's lifetime."
I looked at the pieces of the girl my mother used to wash with a dish towel.
The woman who came into my garden that morning had been sent to make this statue useless. To take it out of clean examination forever, so that nobody could ever say with certainty what it was. And to do it, she had broken it open β and the breaking had rolled the base over and shown the world the one thing that settled the question.
She had destroyed the Reader.
And the destruction had exposed the very thing it was meant to destroy.