“With interest,” he said, eyes gleaming. It was as if he were taunting her with his autonomy now. The we was gone. Her husband now showed off how easily he could act without her input. Riley seemed determined to prove that he could do whatever he wanted without losing her. But prove it to whom? If Riley wanted to show Grace that he held her under the thumb of his love, he had grossly miscalculated. Grace had been gone longer than even she had known.
“You are not a criminal,” she pleaded. “I won’t let you do it. I’ll set off the car alarms across the street. I’ll pretend I’m having a heart attack on the office’s steps. I’ll call in a bomb threat. I’m not going to leave you here when you’re like this.”
“Like what?” he said, gently biting her ear.
“Manic. Delusional. Like this.”
“Well, when I whisk you off to Paris, I won’t be like this anymore. I’ll be cured. I’ll be cured and I’ll be rich.”
For a moment, she hoped he would do it and get caught, once she was long gone. His family couldn’t save him then. And Greg, well—she longed to see him regret anything. But this was not in her best interest.
“I won’t be party to this,” she said stuffily. “It’s dangerous and it’s wrong and I won’t be associated with something like this.”
“We both know that’s not true,” he said.
? ? ?
The snag appeared when, just ten days before Grace was supposed to leave for Prague, Riley had still not finished his fake. Of course, he saw no hurry, since he believed he was meeting her there later. He bragged to her about his glazes, his shadows, his brushwork, the luminescence, until she gave him a warning look. “I don’t want to hear about it,” she said.
“I’m almost done,” he said. “Shame you won’t get to see the finished product.”
If Riley did not finish the painting in time, she and Alls would be sunk. The two of them had to switch the painting together, one upstairs, occupying the docent, while the other made the switch.
But, Grace thought, if Riley didn’t finish his fake in time, they would still have to steal the original. To protect Riley, so there would be no painting for him to steal. His heist would be ruined, and he would be safe in his little Garland life, and she and Alls would be gone, forever. Alls agreed. Again and again, they spoke of saving Riley from his own happy arrogance, from Greg’s caper-movie logic, from trying to win Grace back when she could no longer be won. She was not a prize.
“I’ll buy the fake,” she told Alls. “I’m sure I can find something close enough.”
He stood across the aisle from her, three feet between them. They had not been any closer than this since New York. Alls had called her on the phone with this condition: They had done something terrible and they were planning something worse, but until they were finished, alone together and away from Garland, away from Riley, there could be no physical contact. Alls wanted to hang on, he said, to some scrap of—of—
“Honor?” Grace had said, disbelieving. His was a very relative, very negotiated kind of honor. But she had agreed, more because she feared losing control. If she so much as touched his hand, her mind would leave her. She had to focus.
Now she knew it hadn’t mattered. A toddler was wailing for Pepsi in the aisle behind them, and Alls, backed by bright plastic vacuum cleaners, looked sallow and sleepless under the fluorescent lights, but Grace didn’t feel at all in control.
“Just for a few days,” he agreed. “Until I can swap in the better one.” The better one meant Riley’s forgery, which neither of them liked to say.
“How would you do that alone?”
“I’d have to follow another tour in,” he said.
She bit her lip. This was a rush play, sloppy and desperate, exactly the kind of talk that had made her sure that Riley had no business trying to pull off something like this himself.
“Or we could just leave it. No one would ever notice except Riley.”
“No, we have to get his forgery into Wynne House,” Alls said, swallowing, “so that he can’t rat us out.”
She nodded. She wished he hadn’t said it. She preferred the narrative that they were protecting Riley to the one in which she and Alls were only ensuring their escape.
“I can do it,” he said. “I could go at night, pick the lock.”
She nodded. They weren’t making sense anymore. They wanted it to work too badly.
? ? ?
Buying a fake painting was easy. There was an entire industry devoted to printing images cheaply on canvas of any size and then swabbing clear “brushwork” over the top, nonsensically, to approximate artistry. Grace’s fake Bosschaert wasn’t even a Bosschaert—his work was neither famous nor fun enough for hanging over couches—but a Willem van Aelst, who had worked in roughly the same time, place, and style. The Bouquet of Flowers she bought was identical in size, similar in composition and color palette. She opted not to purchase the fake brushwork, which looked like wrinkled plastic wrap and would attract more attention than the painting itself ever had. Her van Aelst cost $149 plus rush shipping and arrived in five days. Grace pulled the canvas from its bubble wrap and sucked in her breath. They were really going to do it.
She went to the Wynne House on Tuesday morning with her hair pulled back severely, wearing dark lipstick and glasses. She borrowed clothes from her mother’s closet. She took the tour grimly, as if she were a serious historian. Dorothea, the ancient docent who had first toured Grace months ago, didn’t recognize her. Grace was not charming; she was not herself.
While they were upstairs, Alls slipped in downstairs with the fake, which they had cut from its frame. They had, Grace had estimated, ten to twelve minutes while Grace and Dorothea were upstairs. If it wasn’t easy to get the painting from its frame, they agreed, he would walk right back out. But it was; it was so easy. He popped the frame’s back off with the screwdriver tip of a Leatherman, cut the painting out in four clean cuts, and stapled the fake in its place. He rolled up the painting, put it in his backpack, and walked home to Orange Street. By the time Grace and Dorothea came down the stairs, he was gone.
When Alls called her on the phone that night and told her he’d slid the painting above the panels of the drop ceiling in his bedroom, Grace was lightheaded with joy. She was in love and was very close to getting to keep it, forever. Alls didn’t want to save Ginny’s Ice Cream, and when he’d found out that Grace was not quite the sundress sweetheart she had tried to be, he had loved her anyway. She felt newly honest and exhilarated, as though she were skinny-dipping at night in a dark lake.
Grace thought she should take the painting with her to Prague but Alls disagreed.
“You would proposition your ex-boyfriend’s best friend to steal a two-million-dollar painting with you,” he said. “There is a limit to how stupid you make me.”
Not her ex-boyfriend, but her current husband. She never told him. She had limits too.
? ? ?
Grace was leaving for Prague in just three more days. She took deep breaths and tried to keep the strands of her relationships untangled, though she herself was unraveling. She had read about men who had whole secret families in other states or countries. The distance was key. You could not sustain something like this when the two men you were planning futures with lived in the same house. Worse than managing this duplicity was navigating the relationships—plural—she was having with each of them. There was the relationship Riley thought they had, the one Alls thought she and Riley had, and the one she and Riley actually had, whatever the hell that was. And there was what she had found with Alls, which was real.
The night before she left, Riley showed up with a surprise. He propped it up on Grace’s childhood desk, against the bulletin board of all their prom photos.
“What do you think?” he asked her proudly.
The painting seemed to glow. Without thinking, she reached out to touch it, and Riley grabbed her hand. “Christ, it’s not dry yet.”
“Don’t do it, Riley. You are such a good painter. You don’t need to do this.”
“Painter,” he said. “You know, you used to say I was a good artist.”