“Actually, forget your things. I’ll get them. Just get in the car,” Bryde ordered. He turned back to Angelica, and as they left, Ronan heard him say, “You might remember that dreamer was a child once, too, not very long ago.”

Outside the car, Hennessy stopped dead and simply stared at it and through it. It was not because it was invisible. She was staring at and through everything in front of her; her eyes were so bleak and her shoulders so defeated that Ronan wrapped his arms around her.

“I’m not a doll, Ronan Lynch,” she said, her voice muffled. “Take your hands off me.”

He just hugged her tighter, though, as she cried into his chest.

A few minutes later, Bryde came out, looking worn and blank, Ronan’s and Hennessy’s bags over his shoulders.

“Call your brother,” he told Ronan. “Tell him we can see them for a few hours.”

Chapter 29

A special kind of relationship happened between an artist and a piece of art, on account of the investment. Sometimes it was an emotional investment. The subject matter meant something to the artist, making every stroke of the brush weightier than it looked. It might be a technical investment. It was a new method, a hard angle, an artistic challenge that meant no success on the canvas could be taken for granted. And sometimes it was simply the sheer investment of time. Art took hours, days, weeks, years, of single-minded focus. This investment meant that everything that touched the art-making experience got absorbed. Music, conversations, or television shows experienced during the making became part of the piece, too. Hours, days, weeks, years later, the memory of one could instantly invoke the memory of the other, because they had been inextricably joined.

Copying and recopying Sargent’s Madame X would always be associated with Hennessy, because of how intensely the two of them had worked on making it, the process so intensely tangled that it was as if a single entity, Jordan Hennessy, had done it.

Copying Sargent’s The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit would forever be associated with June and the other girls, because of how it was the first time Jordan had truly imagined doing something original, thinking of how a portrait of all of Hennessy’s girls could be posed with a similar chaotic but structured array for good effect, their faces strikingly and eerily and poignantly the same.

Copying Niall Lynch’s The Dark Lady would forever be associated with the Fairy Market and the creeping desperation of those last days with Hennessy before the murders.