Page 136 of Graceless

I lifted my head and looked at him — at the face that will look exactly like this when my hair is white, when my hands can't hold a brush steady, when this house has buried me like it buried Nonna — and he looked back and did not soften it, and did not look away, because we don't lie in this bed.

"You told me once you stopped keeping homes," I said. "Because you furnish a life and you watch it empty. And you went and furnished this one anyway."

"Yes."

"Knowing."

"Knowing." His hand came up and tucked my hair back, and his voice stayed level the whole way down. "I have watched everything I ever kept empty out of my hands, Caterina. I know the price of this to the last hour, and I have never in the whole of my existence bought anything so gladly."

My eyes went hot. His thumb caught the first one before it fell.

"Okay," I said, when I could. "Then we don't waste any."

"No," he said. "We don't."

And we didn't waste that one — the noon light on the quilt, his heart under my hand, the small one keeping its quick time underneath — and whatever the sky decides about us someday, it is going to have to get through him first, and then it is going to have to get through me.

CHAPTER 38

CATE

The art handlers came on a Thursday morning, two of them, in a truck with the client's shipper stenciled on the side.

"This the piece?" The older one had a clipboard and the soft hands of a man who'd moved a hundred million dollars of other people's history. "Sixteenth century, the sheet says."

"That's her."

"Condition report attached?"

"Forty pages and a drive." I handed him the folder. "Imaging, treatment record, findings. Tell whoever unpacks her the varnish is three weeks cured — no crate heat, no direct sun for the transit."

"You do all this yourself?" He was looking past me at the studio — the raking light, the bench, the wall of solvents. "Whole treatment?"

"Every layer."

"Huh." He initialed something. "She looks sad, your angel."

"She's been through it."

They crated her slow and reverent, gloved hands, not one wasted move, and the wingless angel looked out of the open face one last time — mouth open on its held note — and then the foam went in, and the lid went on.

I knew what was under the gold. A name nobody alive could read, on a painting nobody living understood, going out my door strapped in foam — to hang on a wall for people who would see a sad angel and a pretty halo and keep walking.

"Careful on the steps," I said. "The third one's loose."

That's the job. You find out what's under. You write it down. You let it go.

The check had cleared on Tuesday. Wednesday morning I went downtown with a cashier's check for the full arrears.

Three years I'd been chipping at that number. Since before Nonna passed — payment plans, penalties compounding faster than I could earn, the quiet ledger she and I never told Joey about because he'd have had the FOR SALE sign up by Friday. She died still carrying it. I'd carried it since, one commission at a time, and it had always been bigger than the year.

Now it wasn't.

The woman behind the glass looked at the amount, looked at the account, and typed for a while with two fingers.

"Paying it all?"

"All of it."