10. Tasha
TASHA
The morning after the garden, I woke up early and decided the most productive thing I could possibly do with my time was reorganize the condition reports by date instead of by artist, a task that needed doing approximately never.
I sat at the kitchen table in the guest cottage with three different colored folders and a thermos of coffee gone lukewarm, and I told myself this was about efficiency.
It was not about efficiency. It was about the fact that if I walked out to the gallery wing before I had a plan for my face, I was going to run into Grisha, and I did not currently have a plan for my face.
I heard him twice before nine, both times outside the cottage, both times on the radio, both times saying some version of nothing.
Once it was about the east gate. Once it was about a delivery truck that had apparently required his personal supervision to back into a loading bay it had backed into a hundred times before.
I stood at the window with a mug in my hand and watched him stride past at a pace that had no real reason to be that brisk, jaw set, eyes forward, not looking at the cottage even though he had to know I was in it.
We were, I realized, doing an extremely committed impression of two people who had not almost kissed in an overgrown garden the night before.
I gave us both a week, tops, before one of us cracked.
I sorted the folders by date, then by artist again, then by date, and somewhere around the third pass I had to admit to myself that I was not organizing anything so much as I was building a small, elaborate wall between my own hands and my own phone, in case my hands decided on their own to text him something humiliating.
The cottage door banged open around noon, no knock, just a wheeled suitcase clattering over the threshold with a squeak that set my teeth on edge, and Frankie's voice arrived a full second before Frankie did.
"Okay, first of all, this driveway is criminal. Second of all, I need to know why there's a man outside with a gun who looked at my rental car like it owed him money."
"That's Fedya. He's harmless. Mostly."
"Mostly is doing a lot of work in that sentence." She hauled the suitcase the rest of the way in, wheels shrieking against the wood floor, and dropped it flat with a thud that rattled the window glass. "Hi. I'm here. Rejoice."
I got up and hugged her, and it was ridiculous how much better I felt with my face pressed into her shoulder for three seconds, like some of the tension I'd been carrying around for two days could be transferred by contact. "You have no idea how glad I am you're here."
"I have some idea, actually, because you called me at eleven at night and used the word overwhelmed, which you never do, and then hung up before I could ask a single follow-up question.
" She pulled back and studied me with the particular squint she used when she was cataloguing anything, paintings or people.
"You look tired. Good tired or bad tired? "
"There's a difference?"
"There's always a difference." She started unzipping the suitcase right there on the living room floor, pulling out a sweater, a laptop, a bag of pretzels she'd apparently deemed essential travel gear. "So catch me up. Forty paintings, how many down?"
"Twenty-six as of this morning. Fourteen to go before the gala, and some of those are going to take real time, there are two with provenance gaps that are going to eat a whole day each if I let them."
"Great, love a challenge, put me on the boring ones and you take the interesting ones, that's always been the deal.
" She glanced up from the suitcase, and her eyes went past me, out the window, to wherever Grisha had gotten himself to, and something in her expression sharpened.
"Who's the guy who walked past twice in ninety seconds like he was casing the place? "
I did not react fast enough. I knew I didn't, because Frankie's eyebrows went up half an inch and stayed there.
"That's Grisha. Head of security."
"Uh huh." She folded the sweater she was holding very slowly, watching me the entire time. "And does head of security usually walk past the guest cottage that many times, or is that a special service?"
"He's thorough."
"He's something." She abandoned the sweater entirely and came to sit on the arm of the couch, arms crossed, delighted in the specific way she got when she thought she'd found something worth chewing on. "Tasha. What am I looking at here?"
"You're looking at a security detail doing his job."
"I'm looking at a woman who just went a very interesting shade of pink." She let that sit for a second, enjoying it. "Okay, fine, don't tell me, I'll just ask around. Somebody at this compound will crack. There's always somebody who cracks."
I should have let it go there. I have never once in my life let anything go there.
"There was one night I fell asleep in the workroom," I said, in the tone of someone offering a completely irrelevant historical footnote, "and I woke up with a blanket over me. That's it. That's the whole thing."
Frankie went very still, the way a cat goes still right before it commits to something.
"So the scowling bodyguard covered you with a blanket, and you're telling me this like it's normal information."
"It was cold."
"It's September in a heated building, Tasha."
"It's a big building. Drafty. Old windows." I picked up the folders I'd been so productively reorganizing all morning and hugged them to my chest like they might protect me. "You're reading way too much into a blanket."
"I am reading exactly the correct amount into a blanket.
It's my professional specialty. It's why you hired me.
" She hopped off the couch arm and grabbed her laptop bag, grinning now, thoroughly pleased with herself.
"I've been here eleven minutes and I already know more about your love life than I knew after eleven months in the office. This place is doing something to you."
"Nothing is doing anything to me."
"Sure. That's why your ears are that color.
" She slung the bag over her shoulder and headed for the door, wheeled suitcase abandoned mid-unpack in the middle of the floor.
"Come on, put me to work before I have to hear you deny anything else.
I want to see the gallery. And the bodyguard. Mostly the gallery."
I laughed despite myself, actual laughter, the first easy thing that had happened to me since Grisha's radio had gone off in that garden, and followed her out into the afternoon.
The workroom held onto the light late in the day, long gold bars of it slanting across the worktable and catching the dust that always hung in the air no matter how carefully we handled anything.
Frankie took the two safest pieces on my list, a pair of minor still lifes with airtight paper trails, and worked through them at the far end of the table, humming something tuneless and occasionally narrating her findings out loud to nobody, which I remembered now was just how she worked.
I took the hunting scene.
It was not on my list for that day. I had meant to leave it for tomorrow, when I could give it the kind of attention the gap in its history deserved, but my hands went to it anyway, already doing what my mind had decided before my schedule got a vote.
I had examined it twice already since I started the catalogue, both times briskly, both times with half my attention on the paperwork instead of the paint.
This time I put the paperwork down entirely.
I pulled on clean gloves and started at the frame, running my fingertips along the carved edge before I ever let myself really look at the canvas, checking for repairs, old varnish, anything that would tell me a story the documents wouldn't. The dogs in the foreground had been rendered with real skill, muscular and low to the ground, one of them caught mid-stride with its head turned back toward the hunters.
I traced along the lower edge of the frame where it met the canvas, out of habit more than real expectation, the same slow careful pass I had made a hundred times on a hundred other paintings.
My finger caught on it before my eyes did.
A raised line sat barely there, worked into the tall grass at the edge of the tree line behind the dogs, so small and so well hidden inside the natural texture of the brushwork that I had walked past it twice without seeing it.
Under the pad of my glove it read cold, colder than the surrounding paint had any right to be, the way metal reads cold even through fabric.
I bent close, angled the lamp, and made myself look at it properly instead of trusting my fingertips alone.
It was a mark, three short strokes and a curve, deliberate, worked into the paint layer with a precision that had nothing to do with dogs or grass or hunters, a shape that did not belong to the composition and had never been meant to be found by anyone who wasn't running a bare hand slowly across the surface looking for exactly this.
I knew that shape. I had known it since my very first hour in this gallery, since the moment I found its twin worked into the underbrush at the base of a tree on the river landscape, the fourth painting I ever examined in this house.
I had recognized it instantly that first day, because I had seen it a hundred times before that, scrawled small and private in the margins of my grandfather's own notebook, a shorthand he took to his grave without ever once explaining it to me.
I had told no one what I found on the river landscape.
It had felt too strange, too personal, to hand over before I understood it myself, and every day that passed made it feel like a bigger thing to have kept quiet about, not a smaller one.
And here it was again. A different painting, a different artist, a different century by the look of the brushwork around it, worked in by a hand that could not have been the same hand that made the first mark, and yet it was unmistakably the same shape, the same three strokes and the same curve, made with the same private certainty.
I had two paintings now, and two marks, the same shorthand, decades and hands and styles apart.
That was not a coincidence anymore. One strange thing could be an accident.
Two, made by different hands across different lifetimes but sharing the exact same shape, meant somebody had done this on purpose more than once.
That meant it had been passed down and taught, a practice handed from one person to the next like a habit or a rule nobody wrote out loud.
My grandfather's notebook had a name for exactly the kind of secret that got handed down and never fully written where anyone could find it.
I sat back from the table and let my gloved hands fall into my lap, my pulse going harder than the moment probably called for, and looked down the table to where Frankie was still humming over her still life, entirely oblivious, and I understood with total clarity that I was done sitting on this alone.
I had spent long enough protecting myself from one conversation, and the night before, in that garden, Grisha had done the opposite.
He had handed me the real reason behind something he could easily have kept buried, and it had cost him to do it.
I had seen that plainly on his face. I could not keep holding my half back and call the two of us even.
None of it could stay mine alone anymore, not the notebook, not the Keeper, not one mark or two.
If whatever we were building was going to survive being built, it needed both of us standing in the same light.
I peeled off my gloves, set them on the table beside the hunting scene, and went to find him.