Private Viewing

Jo Achterberg has spent eleven years being right quietly. She works slow, twice, alone, and never says a finding out loud until she can prove it, because a long time ago she stopped expecting to be believed. When a routine reauthorisation of Girl at the Window, an eleven-million-euro panel sold by the Grey Gallery, turns up a highlight sitting on top of century-old cracking, she tells the gallery’s owner nothing off the record. He says he’d rather have right than fast.

Anselm Grey has been a widower for three years. His late wife Annelies was the gallery’s scholar; her initials are on every provenance note in the building, and her study has been locked since the funeral. He is the first client who watches Jo work rather than the painting, the first to ask a real technical question, and the first person at her own firm’s table to correct the record when a colleague presents her finding as his.

Then the paper trail opens: eighteen undocumented months in the painting’s history, overlapping exactly with Annelies’s illness. Jo breaks her rule and tells Anselm before the report. He hands her the key to the study. What she finds there turns a technical case into a grief, puts her career against the one thing she has ever wanted, and draws the attention of someone with eleven million reasons to keep the sale unexamined. She cannot be his investigator and anything more to him, and in eleven years she has never put anything ahead of getting the work right.