“I regretted nothing. At least until I brought a girl home for the first time.”

Lia laughed.

“Are you close with your parents?” he asked.

“I suppose. They were busy with their jobs and travelled a lot when I was younger. And now I travel with my own work. We try to keep in touch as much as possible.”

Gabriel only nodded, finding it hard to imagine not speaking to or seeing his family regularly. It was also none of his business, he reminded himself.

“Was there anything else in that envelope?” he asked, guiding the conversation away from the personal.

“Yes, two more photos.” Lia handed him a smaller photo that lacked the professional, posed composition of the others. This was the spontaneous sort that one took on holiday, and it featured the same flaxen-haired woman sitting bareback on a horse, squinting into the sun and laughing. Gabriel turned it over. Zawsze będę pamiętał had been scrawled in faded ink across the back.

“Zawsze będę pamiętał?” Lia read over his shoulder. “Is that Polish?”

“Yes,” Gabriel said, “though my Polish is appalling, I’m afraid.” He pulled out his phone to translate. “It says ‘I will always remember.’”

“I wonder who took it,” Lia mused.

“Someone Polish, I presume.” He looked up. “And the other photo?”

“This.” Lia’s voice sounded strange as she held it up.

It was a black-and-white photo of a large home that could have been a country house anywhere between Manchester and Munich. The background offered no specific details that would suggest location, and there was nothing written on the back of this photo. One of the edges had been damaged and creased, but the image was clear. And distinctly familiar.

“It’s the house in the painting, isn’t it?” Lia breathed. “Millbrook. Your family house.”

“Yes,” Gabriel said rather stupidly.

They stared at each other.

“Holy shit,” Lia said presently.

“Yes,” Gabriel agreed.

“Your aunt didn’t die in Warsaw in 1939.”

“No, it doesn’t seem that she did.”

“Those photos are really her.”

“Yes, they are.”

“And she was here. In this apartment. With my grandmother.”

“Yes.” Gabriel was trying to sort the thoughts and questions that were exploding into his brain but it felt a little like an uncontrolled game of Whack-A-Mole.

They continued to stare at each other.

“Do you think your grandfather found evidence that she didn’t die in Poland? Something specific that made him look for her?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think she had a connection to the art hidden here?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you think that she was working with my grandmother? Hiding people during the war?”

“I don’t know.” It seemed that Gabriel had lost the ability to say anything else.