Dressed casually in jeans and a white shirt with the sleeves pushed up above his elbows, Gaston Boucher was leaning over his work desk studying a piece of paper rather intently. A slight man, he had blond wavy hair that fell below his chin while he worked and round tortoiseshell glasses perched on his nose. His face was stern, like he was a philosophy professor grading a poor paper.

“I heard you were bringing me something.” Gaston didn’t look up, his French accent slight. He held up a small painting to the light and studied it intently.

“Well, that depends. Are you going to try to talk me out of reframing it?” Lara struggled to hold up the heavy painting, which was only about two feet wide by two feet long. She could hear a promotional jingle for 99.7 K-ROCK playing and was touched that he was piping the radio station into the gallery. She’d taken Gaston for a techno or Velvet Underground fan.

“I’ve always thought that frame overpowers what is an unusually intriguing painting.” Gaston peered over his glasses, abandoning the photo he’d been working on. “So, non.” He motioned for her to hand it to him.

Lara had suspected something was going on between Audrey and this man. That Gaston had opinions about this painting meant he’d seen this painting at her mother’s house.

“The thing has to be made of solid gold.” He reached over and easily lifted the painting from her hands, then turned the frame over and studied each corner.

While he worked, Lara walked the perimeter of the gallery.

From Audrey, Lara learned that he’d graduated from the Sorbonne, then knocked around New York City for years trying to make his mark as a punk rock guitarist. When his music career hadn’t taken off, he began working as a painter, then a photographer living in Chelsea back in the late 1970s. The photos of Gaston with famous people—Patti Smith, Lou Reed, Gary Numan, Debbie Harry, and Chris Stein—seemed to support this claim. In them Gaston’s hair was spiky and he wore a suit with a thin black tie like a member of Devo.

He had a section of equine paintings. Also from Audrey, Lara knew that this was how he’d met her mother. Years ago, when he was still living in New York, he’d purchased a horse from Audrey. While driving the horse out of Kerrigan Falls, he noticed that there was an old art gallery for sale. He bought the place, tossing out most of the hotel-lobby-inspired fruit bowl paintings and bad landscapes and replacing them with more modern works that he brought in regularly from New York. He also had a robust wedding and graduation framing business that Lara imagined paid the bills nicely.

After making a full circle around the shop, she leaned over the desk, a tall, long worktable. “What do you think?”