Owen Haig was from the same mold. She appreciated that about him. He knew the utilitarian value of isolation in this type of job, the checking of one’s conscience at the door. But he was better suited to it in some ways than she was. Owen did it with fewer boxes. And without the conscience.

He performed some of the same tricks of acquisition and facilitation as Samantha did, but for only one small, albeit substantially wealthy, client, where Samantha’s employers were myriad and often at cross-purposes. So Owen got to say yes more often than she did, or he had to say yes, depending on how you viewed it.

“No” could be such a luxury. Such a solid lock for the boxes.

Samantha had expended no small amount of unpaid effort to keep the Owen Haig box and the Marcelline Gossard box unmingled for these last four years. Now here she sat, fingers under the figurative lid of each, at Marcelline’s own request.

Samantha didn’t have a lot of friends. Most of them were in the group of regular people who thought she got paid to make a chain of medical centers look good. But Marcelline’s friendship was entirely unique in her life. Samantha didn’t have a husband or kids. She didn’t have pets. Her houseplants had to be the hearty kind. So it was the one outstandingly single time she’d ever gotten to play the rescuer, the caregiver.

From their work together in the gallery and the oddness of some of the transactions and transactors, M had known enough to think of Samantha in a crisis that couldn’t be handled by calling 911. At the outset, this budding alliance was different from all the other people she might think of as friends. She didn’t have to keep M at arm’s length.

It was a special case, an exception, something she could keep, if she chose to. Which she had. And Samantha wanted it still. Funny that she and Owen had this attachment to Marcelline in common, if in very different ways.

The Flinck was always going to have gone through Owen. He would have found it eventually. The Anningers would have insisted. They had insisted, in fact. It wasn’t even unlikely that Samantha might have been a part of it, however it inevitably happened.

The trouble for her involvement was that, whatever Owen’s personal woundedness in all of this, his fury at Marcelline was unfounded. She hadn’t betrayed him. Everyone but Owen knew that. And the Anningers didn’t care. They only demanded that he fix it.

Marcelline would look even worse to him once he knew what role Samantha had maintained in her disappearance all these years.