Page 107 of The Lies We Play

I turn off the water and go back to the desk.

The first thread is obvious now: someone has been laundering provenance through Bianchi, and my name is on documents I didn't authenticate. Not just once, I suspect. The Baratte file feels less like an anomaly and more like the first loose thread someone was foolish enough to tug in front of me.

If I pull it, the whole sweater is going to come apart.

I pull it.

Chapter Fifteen

Livia

Now . . .

I run a query against the archive for every file in the last six years where the foundation appears as funder, and L. Crane appears as senior conservator of record. Twenty-seven files. Twenty-seven. I don't have the energy right now to open each one. I open three at random.

In two of them, my digital stamp is on chain-of-custody pages I have no memory of approving.

In the third, my signature appears scanned on a document dated to a week I was in the hospital with a sinus infection that almost killed me, and which I remember vividly because the antibiotics they gave me made everything taste like pennies.

I close the laptop for one second. Open it again. The numbers are still there.

Twenty-seven.

I look at the portrait.

“In my defense,” I tell her, “I didn't consent to becoming the front of an art-laundering operation. It was not on the syllabus.”

She considers this.

She is, on balance, sympathetic. Possibly because she also spent the last 140 years being attributed to people who didn't paint her.

The second thread hides in the legal language.

Restricted charitable transfer clause.

Of course. The pretty little trapdoor rich people build into paperwork when they want a thing moved without the vulgarity of calling it a sale. A charitable transfer sounds benevolent. Clean. Tax-friendly. It doesn't ask anyone to picture a painting disappearing from one wall, passing through a foundation account, and reappearing somewhere else with a better story attached. Not when the foundation funds the transfer, the receiving institution gets the prestige, and the senior conservator of record—me, apparently—has already blessed the condition, custody, and authenticity.

Most institutions don't check whether the conservator personally signed every stage of transfer.

They check whether the paperwork looks complete.

Trust language.

Cornelius Saint Claire.

That one feels more like your prose: dry, angry, smart, with just enough mechanism.

His name appears in the foundation’s public history, usually accompanied by adjectives like “visionary,” “generous,” “complicated,” which is what rich families call men who were either terrible or too honest for the room. Halston adored him. Not loudly. Halston didn't adore anyone loudly except me in bed and Creed when Creed was too injured to pretend he hated being fussed over.

But Cornelius?

Cornelius was different.

I met him twice.

The first time, he called me Miss Crane with the air of a man taking inventory. The second time, he brought me coffee, asked three questions about eighteenth-century varnish, and then told Halston, in Spanish, that I was smarter than everyone at the table and therefore a risk.

Halston laughed.