Page 81 of Graceless

The furnace ticked. Upstairs, Donnie's television murmured through the ceiling, a crowd roaring at something small.

"Okay," I said, finally. "Now I'm sad for a four-hundred-year-old forger and I don't even know why."

"Yes," he said. "That is the correct response to that painting. It took me longer to arrive at it than it took you."

The last letter took all of Tuesday. It sat where the covering gold was thickest and hardest to lift, so it had come last, and I worked it a half-millimeter at a pass, in the quiet. The radio has been off in that basement since the first letter came up, and I've stopped pretending that's about concentration.

By two o'clock the upper strokes were standing. By three I could see where the final cut turned and closed, still under its skin of gold, a road under snow with the end of the road in sight.

I put the scalpel down and flexed my hands and made myself eat a sandwich standing up, because Sal's first rule is you don't finish anything important hungry, you make mistakes at the finish line, everybody makes their mistakes at the finish line.

Then I went back down and finished it.

Raq stood at the foot of the stairs the whole last hour. He didn't speak and he didn't move, and having him there was like having a wall at my back — I could put my whole attention forward because nothing was getting past him.

The scalpel gets heavier at the end. Your breath gets loud. I worked the final skin of gold a half-millimeter at a pass with my wrist braced, and I thought about Nonna, because you do, at finish lines. She taught me that careful hands are a form of prayer whether or not anybody's listening.

The last fleck came up at four in the afternoon, in ordinary daylight, and the name was whole.

I sat back on the stool. I looked at it a long time.

I photographed it under every light I own, wrote the condition notes with a steady hand I was proud of, and draped the muslin, and stood there with my palm flat on the workbench until my heart came back down.

"It's whole," I said, without turning around. "It's done. Tara gets everything tomorrow, hand-carried."

He crossed the basement and took my hands, and the warmth moved into them, the ache leaving my thumb without my asking.

Tara met me at her office door at nine the next morning and had the folder out of my grip before I got my coat off.

The kettle was on. The desk was cleared — actually cleared, bare wood showing, which I had never once seen in that office — and she'd set out a fresh legal pad and two pencils like a surgeon laying instruments. She didn't say good morning. She said, "Sit anywhere, tell me nothing. I want the prints before I want your opinion."

"My opinion is —"

"Cat." She held up a finger. "I love you. Prints."

She laid the seven prints in a line across her desk, right to left. She got very still. She read them with a fingertip an inch off the paper, once, twice, lips moving without sound — and I watched the scholar's delight come up in her face and then stop, like water hitting a wall.

"That's the whole of it," she said. "You're sure. Nothing left under the burnish."

"That's everything."

She sat down slowly. She looked at the line of prints for a long time.

"It reads like a name," she said. "I can't swear it — nobody could, unpointed, out of context. But look." She touched the air over the last two letters. "That's a divine element in final position. Names carry them there — the -el names, whole families of them. It's built the way names are built, and it isn't any word I can make anything of, and words that aren't words but are built like names are usually names." She squared the prints, and her hands were careful, and her voice was careful, and the delight didn't come back. "So I run it. Every attestation database, every onomasticon, every roster I can reach. Properly. Give me a few days. But Cat — I already ran five letters against everything and hit nothing, and seven should be easier. Names narrow as they lengthen. If seven letters hit nothing⁠—"

She didn't finish it.

"Then what?" I said. "If it's nowhere. What does that mean?"

Tara looked at the prints, and then at me, and gave me the honest answer, which is why she's Tara.

"I don't know," she said. "And I've built a whole life on knowing where to look."

I walked to the subway the long way, down Broadway with the folder empty under my arm, through the ordinary morning — students with coffees, a man selling socks, a woman arguing sweetly into her phone in Spanish — and the whole way down, Tara's unfinished sentence walked with me. If seven letters hit nothing.

The train came. I rode home standing up, holding the pole, like anybody.

Raq was on the stoop when I turned the corner onto Bay 50th — which was ordinary; he is always somewhere with a sightline when I'm due home — but he wasn't reading the rooflines. He was standing very still with his face turned toward the harbor, toward a sky that was doing nothing at all, just afternoon, just weather clearing off the water.