All Chapters of FAMILY SECRET: CLAIMING MY FATHER'S TOY: Chapter 61 - Chapter 70

Vincent talks for forty minutes.I don't interrupt. I sit with my legs tucked under me on the couch and I listen, and he tells me about Fontaine Groupe the way a person talks when they've decided to stop editing themselves, which means it isn't smooth and it isn't flattering and there are pauses where he is choosing words not to manage my reaction but to be accurate.He was twenty-eight. He had been building Caruso Capital for three years, mostly small positions in emerging artists and a handful of commercial real estate plays that had done well enough to give him credibility with larger investors. A man named Édouard Fontaine came to him through a mutual contact with a property development proposition that looked, on the surface, like exactly the kind of undervalued opportunity Vincent had built his early reputation on finding."I did the due diligence," he says. "Or I did enough of it that I could tell myself I had." He looks at his hands. "By mid-2019 there were indicators that the

I don't think about the text for the rest of that day.I think about it at eleven that night while Vincent is asleep and I'm lying in the dark staring at the ceiling with my hand on my own stomach listening to him breathe. He's also not as disinterested as he seems. I turn it over and examine it the way you examine something you found in a coat pocket, not sure yet if it's useful or garbage.The rational part of my brain, the part Dr. Laurent has been carefully cultivating for three months, knows exactly what Amélie is doing. She couldn't shake my trust in Vincent directly. So now she is working the perimeter. Rahim is someone I mentioned to no one except Vincent, which means she is either watching the studio or she knows Rahim personally from years in the same gallery circuit, and she saw an opening and she took it. Plant a seed. Let it grow in the dark without her having to water it.The irrational part of my brain, the part that is nineteen and has been lied to by enough people to

That text is still sitting in my head three days later like a splinter I can't get at.'He has a type too. You'd be surprised how familiar it looks.'I blocked the number. Obviously. But the thing about Amélie is that she times her drops perfectly, says just enough to lodge somewhere uncomfortable and then disappears before you can argue with it.I showed the text to Vincent that night and he looked at it for a long moment and said Marco's history with women was his own business and had nothing to do with the project, and I said okay, and neither of us said the other thing sitting in the room, which is that I am now spending twelve weeks in close professional contact with a man whose history with women is apparently worth mentioning.I go to Rahim's studio on Wednesday and tell him about the Marco project and he listens while he works on the left half of the dissolving-room canvas, which is better now, looser, and he says, "Marco Santoro has slept with half the women in the Paris art

Natasha's studio is in Belleville, third floor of a building that smells like mildew and someone's excellent cooking, and it is the most chaotic space I have ever been in and I mean that as a pure observation with no judgment attached.There are rolls of fabric everywhere. Not folded, not organized, just existing in great bolts of color leaning against walls and draped over a worktable the size of a small car and piled in corners like they got there under their own power. Threads hang from a wooden frame suspended from the ceiling, hundreds of them, different weights and colors, and in the afternoon light they catch and shift when the heating comes on and the whole thing moves like something breathing.The installation she's building is about border infrastructure, she told me last Friday, about the aesthetics of division, and standing inside it now I understand what she meant by politically ugly. It makes your chest tight in a way you can't immediately explain."Touch it," she says f

Professor Moreau takes one look at my documentation, asks three precise questions, and tells me to file a formal notification with the Commission for Looted Art in Europe within the week and to stop all work on the four affected pieces until the claim is investigated. She says it without drama, the way she says everything, like ethics are not complicated, only the situations that require them.I walk out of her office at five feeling lighter than I expected.The decision is made. The process is started. Marco doesn't know yet and Bernard Allard doesn't know yet and the fee is almost certainly gone and I find, standing on the pavement outside the Sorbonne with the evening coming in cold and pink over the rooftops, that I don't care about the fee. I care that I found it and said something. I care that Rachel Weis's eight unlocated paintings are one fewer tonight than they were this morning.I text Vincent: Leaving the Sorbonne now. Long day. Need you.His reply comes in forty seconds: I