Owen’s car slid like melted silver along the curb in the cell phone lot where she’d told him she’d be. Marcelline raked her hair over her bruised face and stepped from the shadow of a tree. She’d tucked in there, going for a look that said casually dedicated to shade and totally absorbed by something on her phone. It kept her away from anyone who might walk by. Her purse was dangling by its stretched and shredded strap. It was all she could do to keep upright. She smelled like smoke and looked like the fighter who didn’t win the belt.

He barely had to stop for her and she was already in, slamming the door on anyone who might have been like her, helpless not to stare at the Mercedes as it went by.

“Is Carly okay?”

“She’s okay. She knows what happened. . . . What? I didn’t go into detail. She’s smart. It’s not like I was going to get away with lying about it. I think she’ll hold. Samantha’s going to see to it that her mother gets an email from John’s account tomorrow. It’ll cover everything. You know Samantha.” He slipped a pointed look sideways at her. “It’ll be solid. All Donna will know is that he’s left them. She’ll make it believable.”

“This is horrible. Poor Carly.”

“She’ll be okay,” he said. “Our baby. The child we made.”

“That’s also horrible.”

“Okay,” he said. “The Flinck is busted.”

“I know.”

“They’ll still pay the four point seven five for it.”

Marcelline’s mouth went dry. “But you already have it. I was always going to give it to you if I found it. Because of everything that happened. I don’t want the money.”

He was surprisingly pleased with himself. “If the transaction doesn’t go through, they’ll wonder. They’ll ask. It’ll be a thing. And they’re getting it for cheap. Trust me, I would pay five million dollars of my own on top of it to never hear another word about the Gardner collection. This is the last piece of it.”

“What do you mean?” But her pulse knew what he meant and it ran to tell her at the same time he did.

“That little stunt you and Jonathan pulled back then—”

“Jonathan. Not me. Not. Me.”

“Right. Sorry. Habit. But they didn’t just get mad. They got obsessed. They wanted all of it. They wanted me to find the whole thing. That’s all I’ve been doing for four years. This is the last one.”

She felt ill. Elated. Amazed, but not unbelieving. For everything he was that wasn’t good, Owen wasn’t a liar.

“They have the Vermeer?”

Owen nodded.

“The Rembrandt?”