“And then he said you guys should rob the place? The both of you?”
“Well, I thought he was joking at first,” she said. “We all did.”
“Right.”
“But then, this painting thing.” She shook her head. “I mean, he’s really doing it.”
Her parents’ cuckoo clock whistled. “Excuse me a sec.”
Grace went into the bathroom and turned the water on. She put her hands on her hips. She just needed to get away from him for a moment and think. Her chest felt like it was going to crack open. He was here, in her house, alone with her. She had to get him out of there. She’d promise to talk Riley out of the forgery, and tonight, she would. That was all there was to do.
She came out and sat down across from him again. “He thinks he can get away with anything, just because he always has.”
“Is this really why you left him?”
Grace swallowed. Did he want her to have left Riley?
“Would it make a difference?” she asked. She looked at him, sitting in the sticky oak Windsor chair, elbows on his knees. Her hand slipped down the condensation on her water glass and she wiped it on her bare leg.
“What are you saying?” he asked quietly, watching her hand.
She saw then the narrowest chance that she had misread him, that he might be as torn up as she was, that he wanted her as much as she wanted him. “I thought you—I thought—”
But she didn’t want to say what she had thought. She wanted to have been wrong.
Grace knew that she couldn’t be both the good girl and the bad one anymore, but she was less and less sure which was which, and she had failed at good already, and she desperately wanted to fail at good again.
“I can’t be what he needs me to be,” she said. “Or I don’t want to anymore.”
“You’ll get back together. You’ll see.” He wasn’t trying to comfort her.
“The reason he shouldn’t rob the Wynne House,” she said, “is that it isn’t worth the risk. The antiques money wouldn’t last longer than a few years, not split like that. I tried to tell him, but he doesn’t do the math.”
“I bet he thinks he’s going to win you back or something. He thinks that way, you know.”
“I know.”
They hadn’t hurt Riley yet, she thought. She and Alls were just miserable, alone.
“What I didn’t tell him,” she said then, “is that his fake painting is a great idea, only there’s no way he can pull it off. He can paint well enough, I have no doubt.” She swallowed. “But Greg is going to fuck up and get them both caught.”
He nodded, intent on a plate of crumbs leftover from breakfast.
“The original is in the back, in the study. Reframed, easy to cut out and roll up. I can promise you that no one has looked at that painting since the day it went up. No one would ever notice, unless they hired a Dutch Masters scholar to do the dusting. But Riley and Greg, together—” She paused. “They don’t know how to keep a secret. Not like we do.”
Alls tapped his fingers on the table for what felt like hours. Did he know what she had meant to say? Would she have to say it more, worse, louder?
“I always knew you weren’t who they thought you were,” he said, finally raising his eyes. “But I guess I don’t know either.”
What they did he mean? It didn’t matter. “Join the club,” she said.
“He trusts you, even now.” He stood up.
She’d overplayed her hand. He didn’t want her as badly as she wanted him. She tried to think of something to say to undo it, to be just kidding.
He hesitated, standing behind her. She could feel him, but she didn’t move.
“Don’t tell him—” she started.
Don’t tell him what? She didn’t know how to finish.
He let the door slam behind him. She listened, but she didn’t hear his car engine turn. She went to the window and saw him sitting in his car, his head back. Finally, the engine turned, and he left.
How had she been so sure in that moment that he was hers for the taking? He had come to her as a friend—to Riley. She’d thought he’d known how wrong a person she was, hiding behind all that nice-girl hair that Kendall and Lana had dismissed so easily, under all those pastel sweaters Mrs. Graham had dressed her in, but she had been wrong. He’d thought she was a good person who’d made one awful mistake, the way he was a good person who’d made one awful mistake. But now he knew. She had told him herself.
23
That night, Riley begged her to meet him at the playground.
“Gracie, my painting is good,” he protested. “No one is ever going to guess that I did this.” He looked at her as if he were on the verge of laughter. “Look at me, baby. Look at me.” He pointed to his face. His curls were aglow from the street lamp behind them. “No one—no one—in Tennessee is ever going to suspect that Riley Sullivan Graham would do something like this.”
A wave of nausea drowned her guilt for a moment. She wanted to kill him. “Don’t,” she pleaded. “Just forget the whole thing. This was supposed to be a game, right? A game.”
He tried to kiss her and she pulled away. “What is this? We didn’t break up. That’s the game.”
“No more games.”
“You want out? Fine, you’re out! You’re too sensitive for this anyway. You worry too much.”
“Riley,” she warned him.
“You’ll see.”
? ? ?
Alls called her the next morning. “We agreed that we would never tell him,” he said, “and we’re going to stick with that.”
She held her breath.
“But I know what I want,” he said. “And I can’t help that.”
She slid down the wall until she was on the floor. “Yes,” she said.
“We can’t let him rob the Wynne House,” he said. “It’s suicide.”
“Yes,” she said. “You told him you’re out?”
“He doesn’t care.”
“I’ve created a monster,” she said.
“How do we steal a painting?”
She had not expected that. She marveled at the we, which sounded now like a word she had never heard before.
“We—we have to replace it with a fake,” she said. “We could buy a fake online, a print of some crappy still life in the same colors, and we put an old frame around it, and we switch them.”
“No sweat,” he said doubtfully.
“It’s not a great idea,” she said. “And besides—he could still try to steal the original, not knowing. And then it would be very clear to him what we’d done.”
“So we can’t do that.”
“No.”
“We need to save him from himself,” he said.
“Yes,” she said, disbelieving. “How close is he to finishing the painting?”
“I don’t know how to tell. I can send you a picture.”
“Yes. He’ll tell me, though, when he’s done. He won’t be able to help it.”
“Oh, you guys are talking?”
“It’s like you thought,” she said. “He thinks this is his grand gesture.”
“And then?”
“Then you take his painting. When he’s in class, probably. And then you take the tour,” she said. “Once you’re upstairs, I come in and make the switch. You have to ask questions, upstairs, to give me time. We couldn’t sell it in America. That would be stupid.”
“Where are we going?”
“I go to Prague in two weeks,” she said.
“Me, too,” he said.
She laughed, a short burst that startled them both. “We don’t have any money,” she said.
“Riley’s going to pay you back for the rent,” he said. “He called it ‘priority uno.’”
How easily they slipped into mocking him, this person they were so determined to protect.
? ? ?
He did pay her back, and then some. Anne Findlay had gotten a call requesting one unsold painting.