When Becky invited Steve to accompany her on the adventure, she put it like this, “Steve, I got a gig at a big firm out in California; you wanna come?” Steve, employed at the time drafting prefab cubicle-based office interior schemes in Pittsburgh, had responded with an explosively enthusiastic, “God, yes!” Not only was this a dream fulfilled. but also he was more than a little relieved to get out of town. He had recently acquired two Louis Comfort Tiffany lighting fixtures from a soon-to-be-demolished movie theater downtown and—wait, back it up: acquired, now that’s a funny word; a more precise word would be stole; yes, he stole them. They were bewitchingly beautiful pendant fixtures, crafted in the teens, each was about the size of a toddler, their mottled glass luminously gold and cream and bronze. When he first saw the lamps in the ruins of the Rialto they tenderly hooked a portion of his heart. He had taken them home and draped them with a quilt on his bed. He slept in a careful arc with them at night. Steve loved them because of their artistry and because of the spark they struck within him. He wasn’t quite sure if they would be crushed along with the rest of the building, or if somebody else was aware of their value. He just knew, as he waded through decades of dust and dirt in the derelict picture palace, he had to save them and now, no matter what; they were his.

Listen to Chapter 9, “A Hard Day’s Night” read to you by London based Pippa Rathborne: