“Do you really think people like Rowena and Pitte, or whatever god’s in charge of hiding the keys, would tape the secret key to the bottom of a desk drawer?”

She sent him a sulky look as she slid the drawer back in place. “I don’t think we can afford to overlook any possibility.”

She looked so cute, he thought, sitting on the floor with her hair tied back from her face and her mouth all pouty. He wondered if she’d worn black because she felt it suited the circumstances.

It would be just like her.

“Fair enough, but we’d get through those possibilities faster if we called the whole team in.”

“I can’t have a pack of people running around here. It’s just not right.” And the guilt of what she was doing scraped her conscience like ragged fingernails. “It’s bad enough you’re here. You can’t use anything you see here in a story.”

He crouched down with her, stared into her face with eyes that had gone winter cool. “Is that what you think?”

“It doesn’t seem unreasonable that the thought crossed my mind.” She rose to take a painting off the wall. “You’re a journalist,” she continued as she checked the frame, tested the backing. “I owe something to this place, to James. I’m just saying that I don’t want him involved.”

She rehung the painting, chose another.

“Maybe you should write up a list of what is and isn’t appropriate for me to write about. In your opinion.”

“There’s no need to get testy.”

“Oh, yeah, there is. I’ve invested a lot of my time and energy in this, and I haven’t printed a word. Don’t question my ethics, Malory, just because you’re questioning your own. And don’t ever tell me what I can or can’t write.”

“It’s just a matter of saying this is off the record.”

“No, it’s not. It’s a matter of you trusting and respecting someone you claim to love. I’m going to start in the next room. I think we’ll do better separately.”

Just how, she wondered, had she managed to screw that one up so completely? She took the last painting off the wall, ordered herself to concentrate.

Obviously Flynn was oversensitive. She’d made a perfectly reasonable request, and if he wanted to get huffy about it, it was his problem.

She spent the next twenty minutes going over every inch of the room, and comforting herself with her conviction that he’d overreacted.

They didn’t speak for the next hour, and though they were two people performing the same task in the same space, they managed to avoid contact.

By the time they started on the main level, they’d developed a rhythm, but they still weren’t speaking.

It was tedious, frustrating work. Checking every painting, every sculpture, every pedestal and objet d’art. Going over the stairs tread by tread, crawling along the trim.

Malory took herself off to the storeroom. It was both painful and thrilling to come across newly acquired pieces, or to see others that had been sold since she’d left The Gallery and were waiting to be crated and shipped.

Once she’d been privy to every step and stage, and had been granted the right to acquire items and negotiate a price. In her heart The Gallery had been hers. She couldn’t count the times she’d been inside it after hours like this. No one would have questioned her presence then. There would have been no need to beg the keys from a friend, or to feel guilt.

To question her ethics, she admitted.

She wouldn’t have felt this awful grief, she realized. Grief that this part of her life had been taken away from her. Maybe she was crazy for refusing the offer to take it back. Maybe she was making a huge mistake by deviating from the sensible, the tangible. She could go back and speak to James, tell him she’d changed her mind. She could slide back into routine again, have what she’d always had.

And it would never be the same.

That was the grief. Her life was changed, irrevocably. And she hadn’t taken the time to mourn the loss. She did so now, with every piece she touched, every minute she spent in the space that had once been the most important part of her life.

She revisited a thousand memories, so many of them part of the day-to-day routine that had meant nothing at the time. And everything once it had been taken away.

Flynn pulled open the door. “Where do you want to—” He broke off when she turned toward him. Her eyes were dry, but devastated. She held a rough stone sculpture in her arms as she might a child.

“What is it?”

“I miss this place so much. It’s like something’s died.” Very gently, she replaced the sculpture on a shelf. “I acquired this piece, about four months ago. It’s a new artist. He’s young, with all the fire and temperament you’d expect from the feel of his work. He’s from a small town in Maryland, and he’s had a little local luck, but no major gallery showed any interest. It felt good to give him his first real break, and to think of what he might do, what we might do in the future.”

She ran a fingertip over the stone. “Someone bought this. I didn’t have anything to do with that part, don’t even recognize the name on the invoice. It’s not mine anymore.”

“It wouldn’t have been here or have been sold if it wasn’t for you.”

“Maybe, but those days are over. I don’t have a place here anymore. I’m sorry for what I said before. Very sorry I hurt your feelings.”

“Forget it.”

“No.” She drew a breath. “I’m not going to say I didn’t have some concerns about how you might handle this whole thing eventually. I can’t claim that I have absolute trust in you. That conflicts with loving you, and I can’t explain it. No more than I can explain how I know the key’s not here. How I knew that the minute I walked in to get the keys from Tod. I still have to look, have to finish what I started. But it’s not here, Flynn. There’s nothing here for me now.”

Chapter Sixteen

FLYNN closed the door of his office, a signal that he was writing and was not to be disturbed. Not that anybody paid a great deal of attention to the signal, but it was the principle of the thing.

He let the idea for the column simply flow out initially, a kind of serpentine river of thought that he would channel into a more disciplined form on the second pass.