“Well, what do you want me to say?” He went quiet, surrendered in both voice and posture for her to lead the way.

She didn’t buy it for a second. It was a game for him. He’d use whatever she indicated she wanted for his own ends. He was well practiced in it. She was not.

So she kept it simple. “First, I want you to tell me what you think you ought to do to make this better? I just want to know.”

“Does Carly know who you are?”

“You mean, does Carly know who you are?” Marcelline had forgotten the ring of a purely mocking laugh. “No. She has no idea.” She left it at that, though the desperate desire to say more vibrated in her teeth.

Jonathan stared out his window, all but turning his back on Marcelline for long enough that it was getting awkward.

“We can still sell the painting,” he finally said.

The sentence and the sentiment were easy enough to understand, but somehow it jammed her signals. She couldn’t move. It was something in the way he’d pronounced we. The inflection he gave it. He was about to say something terrible.

Marcelline relaxed her grip on the pistol, opened her fingers a little without being obvious about it, she hoped. She was buying an instant for her rational mind—giving it a head start on the reaction she could feel was on its way.

He looked back at her lack of response. “What? We can. Why wouldn’t we? There’s no reason we can’t pick up right where we left off. In some ways, nothing’s changed. We’re in the same position we were four years ago.”

He didn’t say it. He couldn’t have. He had. Every loss she’d broken over and every hour of pain she’d endured rushed into her wrist. The hatred crowded down into her knuckles, forcing them to bend around the pistol’s grip.

His gaze drifted to the right side of her face, lit by the streetlight across the road. She’d never not known, in four years, where the light was in a room and how it was hitting or hiding her scars. That ache flared into her trigger finger.

A horrible sympathy mask took over Jonathan’s face. “I know that must be hard to hear in some ways, but if you just—”

“Stop. Talking.”

The gun was up and pointed at his middle, and although Marcelline hadn’t felt her hand move, the sense of being ridiculous was gone.

“Okay,” he said mildly.

“This is simple, actually. We don’t need to have a conversation. In fact, it’s better for everyone if you don’t say anything else. Give me the painting.”

He just looked at her.