“So the photographer is a she?” D’Arcy grinned, pleased that her intuition had been right.

Josh swore. “Her telling me to bring you up here has thrown me more than I’d realized. I never slip up like that.”

“Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone. And you’re right; I can’t just send extra photographs over to the gallery. But I know the curator. She’ll listen if I think the pieces are worthwhile.”

She knew her face must betray all of her anticipation. As an art historian by training, this was like buried treasure for pirates. “We need gloves,” she said. “And the lights.” She looked up at the ceiling but saw that the installed lighting would be kind to artifacts.

“Gloves are over there. But I’m definitely not turning the lights off.”

She laughed. “There is a funny man lurking beneath the lawyer, Josh. You should let him out more. Pass me the gloves. Can I choose where to start?”

He nodded. “You look much more excited about this than you did about kissing me.”

“Only because you put a stop to it much too soon. I assume you’re not going to do the same here?”

“No.”

“Good. Well, if you’ve never been allowed to look at anything on the right-hand side, that’s where we start.”

She opened the first box. It was an assortment of photographs of the house and the gardens, narrowing in on details: flowers, leaves, insects. They had a feel of uncertainty, as if the photographer wasn’t familiar with this kind of subject.

“Look at this,” D’Arcy said, showing Josh a picture of a Wood White, the butterfly that had graced her head earlier. The chateau in the background looked similar to now, but the gardens were less dense, as if they’d only been planted for a few years. Another group of photographs showed four people, two men and two women—taken in the seventies, judging by their clothes—their faces impossible to make out, caught from one of the rooms at the top of the chateau as they wandered through the gardens.

None had the quality of a magic shot that would earn it a position in a retrospective. “Do you have anything?” she asked Josh, who was working his way through another box.

“Not really. The same woman is in quite a few but I don’t know who she is.”

D’Arcy glanced over at the pictures of a young woman. She was striking, but in a wild sort of way, her face so stunning it was hard to look away without scrutinizing it to see if it really was as beautiful as it appeared at first glance. Whoever she was, the young woman was definitely not one for slicked-back ponytails, D’Arcy reflected with a smile.

D’Arcy opened another box and frowned when she saw pictures of incorporeal women who were somehow still standing even though they looked dead. Next, pictures of uniformed men, soldiers grinning out at her, and then one shot that she’d seen a thousand times before, a shot used in Kleenex advertisements, department store Father’s Day promotions, a photograph reproduced in black-and-white prints in IKEA, the final desecration. But this was the original, the source of all those copies, and she could see that none had ever done it justice, that in being overexposed by cheap copies, the image had been robbed of its true power.