12. Tasha
TASHA
Ibrushed my teeth that night with more focus than the task deserved, working the bristles along the same four back molars until my gums stung, because it gave my hands something to do while the rest of me sat with what Grisha had told me over cold lamb two nights before.
Her name was Elena. I don't talk about her.
Nine words, and I had turned them over so many times since that they'd gone smooth in my head, like a stone worn round from handling.
I spat, rinsed, and stood there gripping the edge of the guest cottage sink longer than I needed to.
The bathroom light in that cottage ran a shade too yellow, the kind that made everyone look faintly jaundiced and tired, and under it my own face looked back at me with an expression I didn't love examining too closely.
I examined it anyway. That seemed to be the theme of the week.
He had given me one sentence about a wife he'd buried, or lost, or whatever word applied and he wasn't ready to use yet, and it had cost him something to hand it over, I could tell that much just from the way his jaw had worked before the words came out, like he was moving a stone off his own chest one inch at a time.
I hadn't pushed. I still didn't know if not pushing had been kindness or cowardice, and I suspected it had probably been both, tangled together the way most of the good instincts in my life turned out to be.
What I did know, standing there with a wet toothbrush still in my hand, was that I was in trouble.
It wasn't the interesting kind of trouble I'd signed up for when I took this job, the kind that involved provenance gaps and hidden marks and forty paintings that needed cataloguing before a gala.
It was the kind where I'd started listening for a particular set of footsteps outside the cottage window before I'd admitted to myself I was listening for anything at all.
It was the kind where I could still feel, two nights later, exactly where his hand had rested near mine on that white tablecloth, close enough to touch and not touching, and how much more that restraint had done to me than an actual touch would have.
And underneath that, quieter but not smaller, sat the other thing.
My grandfather had spent decades carrying paintings for a family that apparently needed things carried quietly enough to keep them out of every ledger that existed.
He had a name for someone he answered to, the Keeper, written over and over in a hand that never once explained itself, and now there were two hidden marks in two paintings that matched, and a family patriarch who might or might not be the man behind that word, and a head of security digging into all of it off the books because his boss didn't want the donors spooked.
People did not build systems this careful to protect things that were harmless.
I had spent my whole career around old money and older secrets, and I knew the difference between a family being private and a family being deliberate in the specific way that meant somebody, at some point, had needed to be.
I looked at my reflection and said it out loud, mostly to hear how it sounded outside my own skull. "Don't fall for the security. That's how women in your line of work end up on the news."
I meant it two ways at once, and I knew I meant it two ways at once even as I said it.
There was the obvious one, the one that made me sound like a woman handing herself sensible advice at eleven at night, the kind of line I'd have said to Frankie over wine and laughed about after.
Falling for a man who spent his whole life standing between danger and the people he protected was not a smart use of a heart that had already been broken once by someone far less complicated.
But there was the other reading sitting right behind it, colder, the one that didn't have a joke attached.
Women who went digging into things families wanted buried sometimes did end up on the news, and not as a happy footnote.
I had my grandfather's notebook. I had two photographs of a private mark hidden in plain sight in two separate paintings.
I had a growing conviction that somewhere under all of this sat a reason serious enough that a dead man had kept it out of every record he ever kept, and I was standing in a guest cottage on the edge of a property that belonged to a family whose business I understood only in outline, telling my own face in a bad-lit mirror that I probably shouldn't fall for its head of security.
The reflection didn't say anything back. It never did. I waited there a moment longer anyway, the way you wait after you've said something true out loud, half hoping the room will argue with you and prove you wrong.
It didn't. I turned off the light and went to bed, and I lay awake longer than I wanted to admit, listening to nothing in particular, the house settling, the wind doing something soft in the roses outside, and somewhere under all of it the steady, useless hope that neither version of the warning I'd given myself would turn out to be the one that mattered most.
By the second afternoon I had mostly forgotten I'd ever stood in front of that mirror at all, because the records room had a way of eating a person whole once the work got interesting, and it had gotten interesting fast.
Grisha and I sat across the same narrow table with a stack of acquisition ledgers between us, the leather-bound kind that smelled like the inside of an old church, their pages gone soft and furred at the edges from decades of hands.
We had started that morning with the two marked paintings and worked outward from there, chasing every entry that touched either piece, and somewhere in the second hour the work had stopped feeling like work and started feeling like something closer to a game neither of us would admit to playing.
"Found it," I said, jabbing a finger at a line halfway down a page dated only by a season notation I couldn't parse, some old shorthand for a time of year rather than an actual date. "River landscape, acquired via private sale. That's our girl."
"You've said found it four times today." Grisha didn't look up from his own ledger, but I caught the small tug at his jaw that meant he was trying not to laugh. "Once for the wrong painting. Twice for entries we'd already logged. I'm starting a tally."
"You are not starting a tally."
"I started it an hour ago. You're at forty percent accuracy."
"That's insulting and also mathematically generous of you, so I'll allow it." I slid my ledger closer to his so our shoulders bumped, and neither of us moved to fix that. "Give me the magnifying glass."
"I'm using the magnifying glass."
"You're holding it. That's different from using it.
" I reached for it anyway, and his hand didn't let go fast enough, so for a second we were both gripping the same brass handle over a hundred-year-old ledger like two kids fighting over the last good crayon.
He let go first, which I decided to count as a win, and didn't say anything, which I decided to count as a bigger one.
We worked like that for most of the afternoon, trading pages, arguing over handwriting that had gone spidery and faint with age, both of us leaning in close enough over the same lines that I could feel the warmth coming off him along my whole left side.
It should have been tedious. Provenance work usually was tedious, hours of squinting at faded ink for the reward of one clean sentence you could add to a file.
Instead it felt like something I wanted to keep doing well past when either of us had a real reason to still be sitting there, which told me a truth about myself I filed away to examine later, probably in front of another unhelpful mirror.
"Okay," Grisha said, tapping a page near the middle of the hunting scene's file. "Explain this to me."
I leaned over to look, close enough that our heads nearly touched, and studied where his finger rested.
The main entry was written in a hand I recognized from a dozen other pages that afternoon, careful and slightly cramped, almost certainly Konstantin's, the same hand we'd matched against two letters Sasha had pulled for us the day before.
But in the margin beside it, squeezed into a gap that looked like it had been left on purpose for exactly this, sat two initials in a different hand entirely, looser, faster, the kind of writing that came from someone used to signing things quickly and not much caring how it looked afterward.
R.K.
"That's not my grandfather's hand," I said. "I'd know his hand blind. Whoever wrote this wasn't him."
"It's not Konstantin's either." Grisha turned the page toward the window light, tilting it the way I'd watched him tilt things before, like he trusted daylight more than the lamp.
"Different pressure. Different slant. Whoever wrote the main entry pressed hard and slow.
This was fast. Somebody who wasn't thinking about being read twice. "
"Check the river landscape file." I was already flipping for it, heart doing something quick and unhelpful in my chest, and found the page inside a minute, the entry for the marked river painting sitting three lines down from a stamp gone half illegible with age.
There, in the same loose, fast hand, tucked into the same kind of margin gap, sat the same two letters.
R.K.
"Twice," I said. "That's not a coincidence. Nobody signs a margin twice by accident."
"No." Grisha sat back, and for the first time all afternoon the easy competitive energy between us dropped away into something more careful. "K again, though. Different K."