“Oh—yeah,” Cary said, smiling as he came to stand next to me. “Nice, right? My dad was on a moving job for this guy, transporting his stuff from Pittsburgh to New York, and he gave him this. My dad used to joke that next time, he was going to ask for a cash tip. He would always say it was the only time he’d ever been paid in art. My uncle didn’t want me to hang it in here and damage the walls, but I don’t know… I just liked the colors.”

It was all coming together, like puzzle pieces snapping into place. That was why I’d recognized the name on the moving truck—it was Cary’s. Which meant, against all odds, that the mover story about the painting had been true—but I supposed one of them had to be. I let out a long, shaky breath, then sat down on the perfectly made bed with its plaid comforter. “Cary,” I said.

“Yeah?” He looked at me, now clearly a little bit concerned. I wondered if I should ask him to sit down too. It was like I finally understood why, in plays and movies, people are always being told to sit before getting big news.

“That painting,” I said, pointing to it, “is a Hugo LaSalle.”

Cary frowned, like he was trying to place something. “The… artist?” he asked, then shook his head. “Nah,” he said. “It was just some guy in a studio in Pittsburgh.”

“It’s a LaSalle,” I said. “It’s his famous lost painting. I know because my family’s been trying to find it for twenty years.”

Cary looked at me, then at the painting, like he was trying to figure out if this was just some very elaborate and not-that-funny prank. “No,” he said, a little faintly, and I could understand it—the instinct to hang on as tightly as we can to the world we understand before it all goes topsy-turvy.

“Yes,” I said, on the verge of breaking into hysterical laughter. All the searching, all the years looking for it, and it had been in an apartment in Murray Hill, owned by a teenager who just liked the colors. From all I knew about LaSalle, he would have absolutely loved this. “It is. I’d heard the mover story, but nobody ever knew if it was true.”

“But,” Cary said, sounding more scared than anything else. I understood it. When your life’s about to change, even with all good things, it’s jarring. But you have to go through it to get to the stuff on the other side. “Hugo LaSalle… I mean, he’s famous.”