There were roughly a hundred ways this could go once she found the right house. And only if she discovered a streak of stealth within herself that let her get close enough to do anything about it. But sneaking wasn’t much like her. Emma was untested, but Marcelline had always been a by-the-horns kind of person.

She ran her thumb over the braille of her ruined jaw, the pits and peaks of the scar retelling the story of what was lost to her. And with whose help.

Jonathan had only thought he’d found an old painting, but once she’d explained what it was and the infamous Boston gallery heist, they’d decided together to skip the media attention and the pat on the head and the splitting of the FBI reward for only one small part of the Gardner Museum’s lost haul.

It was unethical and clearly against her contract’s details, but in a business that dealt with rarities every day, the truly unique was understood to be tempting, and not terribly difficult to get away with.

Collectors who bought on the sly tended to stay sly about it, and their impulsive purchases could change the lives of garden-variety art dealers. Most of these transgressions were forgiven in principle, with the understanding that if you got caught, the payoff had best be enough for you to fade into an entirely different circle of friends and colleagues.

Still, even as the doldrums set in and her thirties became the fixed grind that they were for most everybody, it wasn’t anything Marcelline had ever entertained. She’d gotten out on the wrong side of the bed on the morning she’d met Jonathan, and not figuratively. Normally she slept on the right side of the bed, with the left side too-long vacant until the next time she fell in love, or at least into deep like.

But on that day, the sooty morning light had put an end to a night’s restless sleep. She’d woken up before her alarm went off, way over to the left side of the bed, stuck in a sweaty tangle of sheets. She’d kicked them away and crawled out, feeling headachy and off and in the perfect storm of a weirdly expectant mood. Ultimately, it didn’t disappoint.

After lunch, a guy walked in off the street with a photo of the Flinck on his phone and the skeleton of a story of wanting to sell it.

After the decision to go rogue with the painting, and after too much wine and kissing beyond that, the next morning the left side of her bed was full of a hungover Jonathan. Always just Jonathan. He never told her his last name. He wouldn’t. He thought it was funny.

And a few days later, he had left her to die. It could possibly have been forgivable. Anyone would be afraid. Something had gone horribly wrong. Anyone could panic.