Varnish fluorescence indicates single application, est. 10-20 years. Inconsistent with documented provenance claiming continuous family ownership since 1912. Recommend further analysis.
I set down my pen and stared at the peasant woman in her wheat field.
The painting was almost certainly genuine. A lost Repin, hidden from the world for over a century, finally coming to light. It would be worth millions at auction. Victor Harmon would be very pleased.
The paperwork was almost certainly not.
Someone had created an elaborate fiction to explain where this painting had been. Why? If the painting was real, why fabricate its history? Unless the real history contained something worse than mystery. Unless the painting had beenstolen, or looted, or passed through hands that couldn't bear scrutiny.
I should refuse the authentication. That was the ethical choice, the safe choice. Let Victor Harmon take his magnificent painting and his fabricated documents to someone else, someone less curious, someone who would accept the story and sign off on the sale.
But I couldn't stop looking at the peasant woman's face. The way Repin had captured that moment of private revelation. The way the light fell across her weathered skin.
Somewhere, this painting had a real story. And I wanted to know what it was.
Time to dig.
*
Three hours of digging later, my hands were trembling. The kind of tremor I couldn't control, couldn't hide, couldn't think my way through.
I'd been hyperfocusing—that blessing and curse of a brain that couldn't do anything halfway—and the world had continued without me.
I hadn't eaten. I hadn't drunk anything. The water bottle on my desk sat exactly where I'd placed it that morning, still full, still room temperature, still completely forgotten. The afternoon light had shifted while I wasn't paying attention, and now it was hitting me directly through the western windows—too bright, too warm, an assault that my morning self should have anticipated and prepared for.
I should have closed the blinds hours ago. I should have set an alarm to remind myself to eat. I should have done a hundred small things that kept the overwhelm at bay, and I'd done none of them because the painting and it’s history had consumed me completely.
What if I made a mistake? What if I saw forgery and deception where there was only authenticity? What if I cost my client millions of dollars?
The city noise crescendoed.
It started with a car alarm—that particular two-tone shriek that drills directly into the brainstem. Then the construction from the new development two blocks over, a rhythmic pounding that I'd been filtering out all morning but couldn't filter anymore. Someone's bass-heavy music thudded through the walls, not loud enough to complain about, just loud enough to vibrate in my chest cavity like a second heartbeat I hadn't asked for.
My neighbor's dog started barking. High, sharp, insistent.
A truck downshifted on the street below.
Someone honked their horn, held it for three seconds too long.
A siren wailed in the distance, growing closer.
It all hit at once, the way it always did. Every sound equally loud, equally urgent, equally demanding my attention. My brain couldn't sort them anymore, couldn't decide which to filter and which to focus on. Everything became foreground. Everything screamed.
My vision narrowed. The studio collapsed around me until I could only see the painting directly in front of me, but even that was wrong—the colors too saturated, the details too sharp, the peasant woman's face suddenly accusatory.
You forgot to take care of yourself again. You always forget.
My chest tightened. That familiar band of pressure wrapping around my ribs, squeezing until each breath became a conscious effort. My heart pounded too fast, adding its rhythm to the chaos of sounds already assaulting me.
I gripped the edge of my worktable. The wood was solid, real, something to anchor myself to. I tried to count my breaths the way I'd been taught.
One. Two. Three—
A door slammed somewhere in the building.
The numbers scattered like startled birds.
I couldn't do this. I couldn't do this. I was going to die in my studio surrounded by art I was too broken to appreciate, and no one would find me for days because no one ever came here, because I'd built my life around needing no one, and this was what I got for it—
