“He wouldn’t,” Charlie said. “I don’t imagine it’s a thing one discusses.”

“How can you still live here?” I heard myself asking the second-rudest question in the world. “She’s—she’s everywhere.”

“I don’t know,” he admitted. “It’s been—well, I don’t mean to put you in the middle of anything, but Carey assigned us the management of the estate. She shipped us most of her work before she died, with very deliberate instructions, which was awful but also, you know, it was what she wanted.”

Instructions. He means the notebooks. I turned my face toward the long grass, watching it bend in the breeze, so that Charlie couldn’t see the ravenous interest shooting from my eyes.

“And we appreciated that,” he continued. “We have a responsibility to raise the profile of the estate. She left the profits of the estate to Pine City, which makes it all very complicated. Hen and I—we’ve been trying to do what Carey wanted. But they won’t sell a single thing, even though it’s all worth five times what it was when she was alive. And Carey would have known that. She had no problem selling any of her work. But there’s one particular work that could upgrade the market for her previous works quite significantly—and they won’t give it up, so…it’s been several years of limbo. It’s a delicate course. I genuinely don’t understand why they won’t let us put it on the market.”

“What is it?”

“Well—that’s not entirely clear. We haven’t actually seen it,” he said.

“What would they get out of it?” I dared to ask.

He rubbed his fingers together and then opened them to the air in a way that suggested it was an extremely appealing amount of money, enough to, say, buy the planet. “I think, what I would call real money. We can’t seem to come to an agreement. I’ve been trying to encourage them, but I’m getting a bit frustrated. I’ve always found them very hard to deal with, frankly. They close ranks like the military.”

His eyes flicked up at me, and I sensed he wanted me to give him something in return. But I had barely any information.

“I’m working in her studio,” I offered. “It was empty when I moved in.” I realized once it was out of my mouth that this was not strictly true, but I didn’t think he’d be interested in a box of terrible drawings that belonged to someone else—they were genuinely, not merely comparatively, worthless. “Do you—do you know why she stopped using it?”