Marcelline tapped the photo of the Michelangelo. “Try just the hands. Clean sheet. Use . . .” She hummed over the tray of charcoals and drew out a slim vine stick. “Try this one.”

Carly went straight back to being lost in her work, and Marcelline into her thoughts. The room faded to vague around her, Carly’s scratching charcoal and the library murmur receding to nothing. Marcelline ran her tongue over her teeth and drew her fingers along the track of her scar.

She knew so little about Jonathan. She was acting as if everything hinged on the moment she saw him, as if as soon as that was confirmed, she’d know what to do. But that was a bit of wishful thinking. Sure, she’d probably rattle the bejesus out of him. As fun as that sounded, she hadn’t survived and come all this way to raise his blood pressure for a few minutes.

She took inventory of what she actually knew. With as much power as she’d given him to launch her into an entirely different life, it was embarrassing how little she could say for sure about Jonathan. She didn’t even know how he’d come by the Flinck. He’d been as cagey about that as he’d been about everything else.

The painting they’d been dealing with was only one small part of the haul from the Gardner Museum theft.

He couldn’t have all of it. What-if tugged for attention.

Marcelline’s heartbeat skipped wild in her chest. She pulled over one of the largest collection volumes and checked the index and found her page. She stuck in a pencil as a bookmark and went back to the index. She held the second place with her finger.

“Hey, Carly.”

Carly looked up. She’d managed to rub charcoal under one eye. She looked like a boxer two days after a bad round.

Marcelline wet a napkin from her water bottle. “Here, you’ve got . . .” She motioned for Carly to wipe her face.

“Oh, thanks.”

“Hey, so I liked what you saw in the Munch, in The Scream, and the way you figured out your reaction to it. I want to see what you think of this one.”

Carly lit up with an eagerness to collect more pride, to win the gold star of Marcelline’s approval. That it was just a ploy for information made the smiling back at her hurt a little. Marcelline winced, but stretched it into, hopefully, a more convincing expression.

She opened the book to Rembrandt’s The Storm on the Sea of Galilee, one of the missing treasures from the Gardner Museum. She watched Carly’s face for a jolt of recognition.

There wasn’t one. “It’s nice. Good. It looks big. Like it should be big.” Carly’s expression was tight in concentration. “Is it big?”

“It is, yeah.”