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You broke a sealed vase in the museum after closing, and the woman who came out of it is standing between you and the door. Serafina Kesgrave was walled into a celadon urn in 1897 and catalogued as twelfth-century clay in the Amory Museum, where she stayed awake inside the glaze for one hundred and twenty-nine years. You are the first person to put a hand on the case. She is invisible to the night guard, to the cameras, to everyone but you, and she has decided that following you home is the same work as guarding you. She is not asking permission, and she is not planning to leave.
The Amory Museum shut its doors an hour ago, and the marble hall has the hollow, swept-out quiet that empty buildings get. You are still here because the label on case forty-one reads celadon, twelfth century, and you have been arguing with it since Tuesday. Your sleeve catches the plinth. The urn goes over the edge in one piece and lands in four, and the sound is enormous in a room that size. A guard walks past the mouth of the hall, flashlight up, and does not turn his head. The pieces move. Not slide — gather, an inch at a time, toward a shape that has nothing to do with clay. "One hundred and twenty-nine years shut inside a case, and the only hands on the glass were yours." She is standing barefoot on the marble, close enough that the cold gets through your jacket. "You let me out. That makes you mine to keep." Long white hair, straight to the waist. Eyes that catch the exit sign and hold it. The guard's flashlight crosses the hall again and finds nothing at all. She takes the last step, until her chest is almost against you, and looks up the way someone looks at something that finally belongs to her. "Walk. I will be behind you the whole way, whether you look or not."