“The thing is, Jonathan, I don’t think you are. I don’t see how that’s possible. I have a meeting here with Marcelline in a little while that seems to have eclipsed the meeting you and I were supposed to have. Then I’ll be on my way home soon and the painting will be on its way to its new owners. It just seems the payee will be different.”

“Don’t count me out of this yet.”

“Oh, how could I? I wouldn’t like you if you were just a tenacious little wannabe. But I like you less even than that. You’re tenacious not because you want it, but because you think you deserve it. I’m sure you’ll still be in it until the end, if you can only find a way. So what are you going to do tomorrow, Jonathan?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, I’ll be sleeping in my own bed. Marcelline will be, I don’t know, wiggling around in a bathtub full of money or something. And you will be? What? Back at home on dandelion row?”

Jonathan didn’t say anything.

“Or do you have enough squirreled away to also be somewhere else tomorrow? To get lost like you need to? You don’t have to answer right away. Give me a second of dead air for each thousand dollars you still have from what you stole four years ago.”

“Fuck you.”

“That’s what I thought.”

There was a knock on Owen’s door. “Housekeeping!”

He let her in and swept his hand at the desk.

Owen had wound Jonathan up enough that discerning the truth from a lie should be easier. It should be something he’d be able to compare to what Marcelline would tell him when they met. His pulse sped up at the thought of sitting across from her. Want. Anger. Forgiveness.

“How did you lose the painting?” Owen put the $20 bill on the newly dried desktop next to the maid as she swept glass into a doubled plastic bag. They exchanged knowing nods and she whispered so as not to interrupt his call, “Thank you.”

“You were just hours away,” Owen said. “It was right there.”

“Wait. You don’t know what happened?” Jonathan sounded a little hopeful. The kind of hope that makes a man with his foot in a door think more about the other side of the threshold than the relative weight of doors on ankles.