Owen paused, then gave Jonathan the least of his own sentences back.

“I look forward to hearing from you.”

Owen closed the call and cranked the Mercedes’s engine back to life. He didn’t want to love the car. It had an axle in both worlds—too showy in one and too humble in the other. He felt weak in that, at his heart, the car was in the same category as his rain-shower fixture in his bathroom and his underwear and his bedsheets and the occasional woman who touched his naked skin. The car was something intimate, a beautiful chain to the world that other, lesser people seemed to enjoy.

He thought of wacky, economy-class Charlie and the day he’d first seen the painting in the video. Something somersaulted inside him—then and again now.

He dropped the Mercedes into gear and pulled out into the mild suburban traffic.

He’d told Jonathan to give him twenty-four hours notice to meet up. But Owen didn’t need twenty-four hours. He probably didn’t need twenty-four minutes. He’d been in town for a day and a half, not knowing whether the girl, whom he’d watched walking home from school with her friends, deep in conversation punctuated in the occasional wild, uncontrolled gestures of youth, was heading to the plain little house that linked back to Marcelline, Jonathan, or some unknown and unlucky soul who would eventually tell Owen, with a last breath if need be, what he wanted to know.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Marcelline was growing convinced that the sense of knowing yourself was a delusion. The smackdowns you delivered in the bathroom mirror rarely happened to a foe who wasn’t your own reflection. The scripts you wrote in your head were almost never performed. You knew what was important to you, but you didn’t insist. You knew what was right and still steered around it. You took self-defense classes and could, in theory, stay frosty and flip an attacker over your hip. But in the end you still stood there and got shot in the neck.

The thing that bothered her, though, was wondering which was the real Marcelline. Was it the one who planned, or the one who abandoned plans and principles in the face of life rushing over her?

She wanted to see Jonathan, wanted to lay eyes on him. A plan about what to do would start with getting a second first impression of him. She’d only known him for a few days a long time ago.

There weren’t any photographs, not even of the painting. He wouldn’t send it to her. He wouldn’t give her his number. He never even told her his last name and made a big joke of it, promising it for later when all was said and done. And deposited.