Chapter 2

The photograph came out folded in quarters, and Emmett opened it on the black glass with two fingers and smoothed it flat with the heel of his hand.

It was old. It had gone the color of weak tea at the edges. It was black and white, and it showed a workbench under a lamp, and at that bench sat Hollis Vane - the founder, the name on the door, the man whose face hung in the display hall and whose signature was stamped inside every box the house had ever sold.

Hollis had his hand on the shoulder of a young man.

The young man was turned three-quarters away from the camera, his head down over something in his hands, and he was wearing a watch - plain steel, round, unremarkable, with a band worn soft at the buckle. It was the same watch that was in the tray under Trent Alcott's palm.

Trent looked at the print for two seconds. Then he looked away.

"What is this supposed to be?"

"Look at the wall," Emmett said.

"I'm not-"

"Turn around and look at the wall."

Trent didn't. Behind him, under the small lamp, in a plain frame on the oak panel, hung a photograph of Hollis Vane at his bench. Same bench. Same lamp. Same day, you could see it in the way the light fell across the vise. It had hung there for as long as anyone on the floor had worked at the house.

It was cropped at the left edge.

The young man was gone.

Nadia Pruitt had seen the uncropped version. She had seen it four months ago, on a Tuesday, when Trent had sent her down to the basement to count archive boxes because he didn't want to do it himself. There had been a box of loose prints, and on top of them, loose, unlabeled, un-framed, had been that picture - the whole picture, with the boy in it. She had held it under the bare bulb for a long time. She had not known who he was. She had put it back exactly the way she found it.

Now she was looking at a second copy of it, curling slightly on the counter, and her mouth had gone dry.

"Mr. Alcott," she said. "The intake form."

"What about it."

"The description line." She had the form in front of her. She had pulled it from the tray without being asked. "He wrote - 'engraved on the bridge.' And then the engraving." She read it slowly, out loud, because she had read it twice already and still didn't understand it. "For the boy at the third bench."

Nobody in the alcove moved.

"That's what's cut into the watch," Nadia said.

Trent turned his head and looked at her for the first time in the way he looked at people he was about to fire.

"Put that down."

"It's on the intake form. It's on the-"

"I said put it down." He turned back to Emmett. "You engraved a line into a house piece."

"I didn't," Emmett said. "He did. In 1969. Before I ever walked in the door."

Trent laughed, short and hard. "So now you're Hollis Vane."

"No."

"Then who are you?"

Emmett said nothing.

The rain ticked at the window. Somewhere in the display hall, the wall clock that had been keeping time in that room since before any of them were born moved to the next minute with a soft brass sound.

Trent picked up the house tablet, swiped it awake, and turned it toward the counter so the whole room could see. The insurance schedule came up, page after page of the house's holdings, and he scrolled to the right line and tapped it.

HOLLIS VANE NO. 1 - 1969 - HOUSE ASSET. Replacement value: $410,000.

"There," he said. "It's listed. It's ours. It has always been ours."

Nadia leaned in. She wasn't trying to. Her body did it before her mind agreed to it.

The schedule had a log column on the far right - a narrow gray strip of timestamps, small as a footnote, listing every time a line had been touched. She got one clean look at it before Trent registered what she was doing and tilted the tablet away.

The top entry on the log was not from 1969, or 1994, or from the year she'd started working there.

It was dated three weeks ago.

"Rusk," Trent said, calm as a man reading a parking ticket. "Call it in. Attempted theft, four hundred and ten thousand."

Rusk took out his phone.

Emmett looked at the folded photograph on the counter, and at the cropped one on the wall, and said nothing at all.