After Hours is a romance column: sensual, non-explicit fiction for grown-up readers. All characters are invented adults; any resemblance to real persons is coincidental.
Vera and Thomas, part seven.
December arrived the way it always does in Manhattan, all at once and slightly ahead of schedule. The tree went up at Rockefeller Center, the sidewalks along Fifth filled with people walking four abreast and very slowly, and the Stockholm institute sent Vera a packet so thick it had to be signed for: housing forms, a floor plan of her bench, a list of the reagents she would be permitted to use and, in a separate envelope, a laminated card explaining how to sort household rubbish into seven categories.
She read the rubbish card twice. At thirty-nine she had restored a fourteenth-century psalter and testified in a provenance dispute, and she was not certain she was equal to Swedish recycling.
Thomas, when she showed him, studied it with professional interest and declared it the best-engineered document in the packet. Then he asked whether she had ever been to the Cloisters in the snow, and when she admitted she had not, he looked so pleased that she agreed to go before she had checked the forecast.
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