“Oh, thank you,” he said, giving me a happy, relieved smile. “I didn’t want—I mean, I just wasn’t sure when—anyway. I’ll just be a second. You’re welcome to come in,” he said, opening the door wider and disappearing inside.

I stepped inside a small, scrupulously clean apartment, most of the lights on low. I could see a door right across from the entryway, and as Cary pushed his way inside, it swung wider. “Are your aunt and uncle…,” I started, and Cary poked his head out of the room he’d disappeared into.

“Still stuck in Pennsylvania,” he said, shaking his head. “They’re going to be there until tomorrow at least. My uncle feels so bad about the key thing. He keeps apologizing.…”

Cary kept talking, but his voice faded to background noise, because I’d seen something the moment his door had swung wide.

It was like how you can see just the side of someone’s face for a fraction of a moment and recognize them. How a second of a song or movie clip is enough to recall the whole thing. How a blur in your peripheral vision is enough to make you jump back from the curb and avoid the bike barreling toward you.

This was like that. It was seeing something I’d been searching for my entire life, even if I didn’t know what exactly it would look like. It was familiar and unfamiliar, and even though it was just a flash, a moment, I knew it.

And so I walked up to Cary’s room and pushed the door open, startling him—he’d been hunched over his desk, writing something. But I didn’t care if I was being rude, because that half second had been enough to let me know I was right.

I had always thought that New York Night number three would be in blue. But it wasn’t. It was golden.

Hanging on the wall in front of me was Hugo LaSalle’s lost painting. It was right there.

I’d found it.

“Hi,” Cary said, sounding surprised. “Sorry—I’m almost done. If you need to go, I can hurry.…”

I didn’t respond, just walked closer to the painting. I didn’t think it was a fake. Nobody had ever seen this before, so how would it be? But it was also just obvious this was a LaSalle. The size, the brushwork, the signature in the corner with a crown over his first name—it all fit. In all the speculation about what was in this painting, I’d never guessed this—that the third canvas in the series shifted perspective slightly. The skyline was still there, but we were now more with the people on the ground. Couples holding hands. People walking dogs. Parents and children. Friends. Dwarfed by but also somehow a part of the New York skyline.

It was beautiful.