“What a pity I can’t take all of this back to Australia with me,” she said, indicating the ceiling flying up into the void above them, almost impossible to see without arching both neck and back.

“Excess baggage charges would probably set you back a bit,” he said dryly as he watched her drink in the house, assessing her, but not in a voyeuristic way.

“So do you trust me yet?” she asked.

“No.”

It was her turn to laugh. “Repaying my flattering honesty with your more brutal version, I see.” Then her eye caught sight of it, just one of the many things she’d wanted to see: a single photograph, not large, but one that made her advance.

It was a picture of a mother and child, inspired, she knew, by an 1883 Christian Krohg painting of an exhausted mother sitting beside a sleeping baby, her head dropped onto the nearby bed, asleep, fatigue etched into every stroke of oil on canvas. In the same way that the painting had eschewed the artistic tradition of the devoted mother and child, the photograph in front of D’Arcy showed the naked torso of a woman, sweat slicked, hair glued to her head, a newly born child screaming on her chest, one arm outflung, protesting. The woman’s eyes were shut and her face echoed the exhaustion of the painting, as if she were saying, Why now after hours of labor must I feed this child? But then the careful viewer saw the mother’s hand, one finger outstretched, caressing the baby’s hidden cheek.

“It’s…” She paused, realizing she’d been in a reverie, had been standing with her hand reaching toward the photograph, as if communing with it. “One of the best pieces of work I’ve ever seen,” she finished simply. Then she turned to Josh, relocating her professionalism. “Why is it hanging? I thought it would be packed.”

“The contract was for you to pack some of the more valuable pieces,” he said as if she were an idiot.

“I signed the contract, so I know what it says,” D’Arcy replied testily. “But I wasn’t expecting to pack something like that.” It was a dream, to handle a photograph so exquisite, but it was also a bit of a nightmare. What if she ruined it? “How many exactly do I have to pack?”

“Most of them,” he said matter-of-factly.

“Most of them?” she repeated. “I’m only here for two days.”

“You’ll have to change your plane ticket. It’ll take at least a fortnight.”

“The contract you sent to the gallery—I assume you are the Josh Vaughn who, as the photographer’s agent, wrote the contract to which I am subcontracted—mentioned ‘a few valuable pieces.’ Most of them is not a few of them.”

He shrugged, irritatingly, as if it wasn’t his problem. “I called the gallery and explained that the photographer didn’t trust anyone else to do the packing. That you’d need to do it and you’d need to stay longer. They emailed back a confirmation to you of your extra fee now that the job will take more time.”