The rain started just as Eva crossed the city limits.
It washed the color out of the world, turning the highway into a blur of gray. She drove in silence, the rhythmic thud-thud of the windshield wipers the only sound in the car.
She wasn't going to Vance & Sterling. She wasn't going to the police.
She was going to Elias Thorne.
Elias was a retired art restorer. Twelve years ago, before Carter Holdings injected millions into Arthur Bennett's gallery, Elias had been her father's mentor. They had shared a cramped studio, breathing turpentine and dreaming of the big leagues.
Then, abruptly, Arthur had cut him off.
Elias lived in a small, cluttered house at the end of a cul-de-sac. When he opened the door, he looked exactly as Eva remembered: stooped, smelling of pipe tobacco, his hands stained with permanent ink.
"Evie," Elias breathed, his eyes softening with genuine grief. "Come in out of the rain, child. I saw the news."
The house was a maze of antique clocks and dusty canvases. Elias poured her a cup of black tea in the cramped kitchen.
"I'm so sorry, Eva," Elias said, taking a seat across from her. "I know we haven't spoken in a decade, but Arthur... he was a brilliant man. Once."
Eva wrapped her cold hands around the mug. "Once?"
Elias looked down at his tea, stirring it slowly. "People change when the money comes in. I always assumed that was it. Daniel Carter bought his gallery, and Arthur didn't have room for a dusty old restorer anymore."
"It wasn't just the money, Elias," Eva said softly, playing the only card she had. "It was the accident. In Switzerland. He almost died on that mountain."
Elias stopped stirring.
He looked up at Eva, his bushy gray eyebrows knitting together in confusion.
"The avalanche," Eva clarified, feeling a strange flutter of anxiety in her stomach. "He shattered his right femur. He was in a hospital in Geneva for a month. It changed him."
Elias stared at her for a long, uncomfortable moment. The ticking of the antique clocks in the hallway suddenly seemed deafening.
"Evie," Elias said gently. "What avalanche?"
The flutter in Eva's stomach turned to ice. "The skiing accident. In 2014."
"Arthur went to Geneva in the winter of 2014, yes," Elias said, his voice slow, careful. "But he didn't call it a skiing accident. He told me he slipped on an icy sidewalk outside his hotel. Said he bruised a couple of ribs."
Eva couldn't breathe. "Bruised ribs? Elias, he had three surgeries. He had a titanium plate put in his leg."
No metallic anomalies noted. The medical examiner's report flashed behind Eva's eyes like a strobe light.
Elias slowly shook his head.
"Eva, I saw your father three weeks after he came back from that trip," Elias said. "He walked into my studio unannounced. He didn't have a cast. He didn't have a cane. He walked perfectly fine."
Eva stared at the old man.
"He even helped me lift a solid oak display case," Elias continued, his voice dropping to a whisper, as if he was realizing the impossibility of it for the first time. "A man with a freshly shattered femur doesn't carry two hundred pounds of wood up a flight of stairs."
The tea in Eva's mug was trembling. Her hands were shaking too hard to hold it still.
"He lied to you, Evie," Elias said, a profound sadness in his eyes. "But that wasn't the worst part."
"What was?" Eva asked, dread suffocating her.
"His eyes," Elias murmured, staring past Eva into the rainy window. "When he walked into my shop that day... he looked at me like he was calculating my threat level. He was jumpy. Paranoid. He kept checking the windows."
Elias looked back at her.
"He didn't come to say hello, Eva. He came to collect an old sketchbook he'd left in my safe. He took it, handed me a check for fifty thousand dollars, and told me to lose his number." Elias paused. "He wasn't acting like a man recovering from an injury. He was acting like a man running from a ghost."
Eva sat completely paralyzed.
The curator in her mind was rapidly rearranging the exhibits of her life.
If the man who came back from Geneva didn't have a shattered leg...
Then the man who came back from Geneva didn't need titanium plates.
Which meant the flawless X-rays on Ethan's computer weren't a sign that the body in the morgue was a fake.
It meant the body in the morgue was the exact same man who had lived in her house for the last twelve years.
Eva felt the world tilt violently on its axis.
"Elias," Eva forced the words out of her constricted throat. "Did he leave anything else behind? Anything at all?"
Elias hesitated. Then, he slowly stood up and walked over to a cluttered bookshelf. He moved a stack of dusty auction catalogs and pulled out a small, tarnished silver cigar box.
He brought it back to the table and set it down in front of Eva.
"He dropped this when he was rushing out," Elias said. "I tried to mail it back to him, but it was returned to sender. I just kept it in the drawer."
Eva reached out. Her fingers brushed the cold metal.
She opened the lid.
There were no cigars inside. Only a single, faded Polaroid photograph.
Eva picked it up. The edges were worn, the colors slightly muted by time.
It was a picture of a man sitting at a café table in a European piazza. He was holding a newspaper, looking directly at the camera. He had her father's nose. Her father's jawline. Her father's eyes.
But it wasn't her father.
The man in the photo looked slightly younger, his posture relaxed, a confident, arrogant smirk on his face that Arthur Bennett had never, ever worn.
But that wasn't what made the blood freeze in Eva's veins.
Eva turned the photograph over.
On the back, written in her father's unmistakable, elegant cursive handwriting, was a single line of text.
Geneva. February 14, 2014.
It was the exact date of the "avalanche."
Beneath the date, there was a name.
It didn't say Arthur Bennett.
It said:
Target Acquired.