Then she turned away from him, leaned on the desk, and the two women conferred in low voices as Storm moved deeper into the room. He pretended to look at the paintings on the wall. The tortuous rocks piercing turbulent skies. The crucifixes shooting up among stark, towering pines. Cathedrals draped with ominous gloamings. And moons dying into misty seas. He took in only a sense of their haze and fervor, image fragments and the seething ambience. He was seething himself meanwhile. Struggling with an agony of regret. All this time wasted. All this blather about paintings and theories and whatnot. And now he was going to walk out of here and never see her again.

“That one hung in Carinhall.” Sophia was standing behind him suddenly. He found her looking past him at the painting before which he’d stopped: a silhouetted castle on a silhouetted hill.

Storm gazed at her blankly. “Carinhall?”

“It belonged to Hermann Goering during the war,” she said. “The Nazis loved this sort of thing. The medieval imagery, all the links to folklore, all the hearkening back to the Holy Roman Empire, it was right up their street. Some people say German Romanticism—the malaise allemand—was responsible for the Third Reich. They say the work is tainted with evil …”

Storm gave a slow shrug. He remembered what Harper had said about the Nazis and her father. He thought maybe he should say something to reassure her. “Well. Those guys are all dead anyway,” he said after a while.

Sophia shifted her attention to him, smiled wryly. “The past is past, you mean.”

“Hey. If the past isn’t past, what is? Right?”

She seemed about to answer, but said nothing, only shook her head, her lips parted. Then, as if confused, she looked away, fussed with her brooch again. “I think nothing ever dies,” she murmured. “It all gets chiseled into the skin of things.”

And then, when she lifted her eyes to his again, to Storm’s astonishment, everything was different. They had a “moment.” That’s what they called it in the movie business: a “moment.” “We need a moment between the hero and the girl here,” Storm would say about a script that wasn’t working. “When they first meet, there’s gotta be a moment.” A “moment” was an exchanged glance, a gesture, a frisson, something where emotion or information passed between two people without words. When Sophia lifted her eyes to his, their distance, their flatness, their coolness had fallen away. Her gaze was wide and deep and desperate and there was a “moment” between them, in which Storm thought, Oh man, she’s in trouble. She’s afraid.

But a moment was all it was. It ended so quickly he wasn’t even sure it had happened. She sniffed disdainfully, brusquely turned her head. Storm didn’t know what to say. He gave a nervous laugh, a nervous gesture.