Owen pulled his car into the lot, the strange heaviness of the day, these years, this parting, dragging the time down to a crawl. Owen let the car drift to a stop before the last turn at the side of the building.

“Did you ever think we . . . ?” He stared straight ahead.

It wasn’t flattering to be the flaw in granite. The only one who could hurt him. It made her chest ache. She didn’t look at him, but heard him swallow.

“I would have disappointed you, Owen. You lead with that. Everyone knows it. You scare people. You scare me. Possibilities don’t follow something like that.”

“If I scared you, you hid it well.”

“I know. That’s the thing I lead with.”

Owen nodded and took the turn around the hotel. Carly opened the side door of the building and peered out.

“Let’s not cross paths again,” he said.

Marcelline measured his expression for threat. There was none. Just an ending. And even the barest hint of a smile under the surface.

“Yes. Let’s not.” She pushed the door open, but leaned in, one foot already on the pavement, and kissed his cheek.

She pulled herself out into the late-afternoon sun. The door thunked home behind her.

There was no way to keep the bargain. They crossed paths often, if only in memory, and, for Marcelline, always in the sound of the receding purr of a big engine.

EPILOGUE

At the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on a chilly Boston spring day, a young woman moves from the hall surveillance into the frame of the first camera in the Dutch Room, DR Int 1. She crosses the screen from left to right with a long, sure stride that pulls the security chief’s practiced eye from his divided attention to his grandchildren’s vacation photos on Facebook.

He feels old now, but the job feels new these days with an amiable crush of tourists excited by the saga of the restored collection. It’s been all over the news and cable TV specials. An anonymous tip, and then somehow a bunch of rich people made a crime into an act of charity. But at least the artwork was back where it belonged.

Now, hundreds of people a day file across the screens he monitors from the camera room, as he has for years. But this girl is someone you notice. She stands out. Someone you can’t not see.

He watches her. She seems familiar, but he can’t place it.

She doesn’t have an audio-guide handset. She doesn’t turn for the Rembrandt or the Vermeer. Everyone goes to the Rembrandt or the Vermeer first. But this one goes straight for the Flinck, back in its gilded frame after all those years, faced out to the far corner of the room as it was before the robbery.