The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the great New York institution known simply as the Met, appears in the novel as a place where the private and the public lives of Alex Claremont-Diaz and Henry Fox-Mountchristen-Windsor intersect with unusual intensity. It is not a neutral backdrop but a stage on which their secret relationship is both consummated and performed, a space where the demands of their public roles and the urgency of their private desires are negotiated in full view of photographers and, later, in the shadow of history itself. The museum's grandeur—its marble pillars, its vaulted galleries, its echoes of centuries—provides a fitting setting for a love affair that is itself caught between the monumental and the intimate.