“I’m allowed to hate my sister, but nobody else is.”
Anna Collins
Colette was asleep on my bed when I got in, which was good, because it meant I wouldn’t be tempted to cry, but annoying, because my pity party was not for sharing. But then I saw the mascara trails on her face, and all inclinations to self-indulgence disappeared.
“Colette,” I whispered. “What happened?”
It wasn’t that late, and my sister was a night person, which meant she’d cried herself to sleep. She cracked an eyelid open and then rolled away to face the wall.
“I’m going to make some hot chocolate,” I said as I got up and turned the kitchen light on.
“Do you have any whipped cream?” Her voice sounded raw.
I scoffed. “No.”
“What good are you then?” she said, and I was glad to hear the snark.
“I have marshmallows,” I said as I got the milk out of the fridge and poured it into the pot from a fondue set that I used as a saucepan.
“Homemade?” She rolled over to watch me.
“Who are you? Do you know how hard marshmallows are to make?”
“Lazy.”
“You’re lazy,” I said as I whisked good chocolate into the milk.
“No, you.” There was a smile in her voice, and it made the tension in my chest let go enough for normal breath.
She got up off the bed and went into the bathroom. “Well, that’s pretty,” she said, presumably to her reflection. Then I heard the sound of running water, and when she emerged, her face was clean and bare of make-up. She looked at my outfit with a raised eyebrow. “You had a date?”
“Why do you say that?” I countered, because it wasn’t a date.
“Because that’s an actual shirt, not a snarky T-shirt.”
“I have actual clothes.”
“You’re avoiding the question. Who’d you go out with? Cipher man?” she asked as she parked on a barstool across from me.
“Why were you crying?” I countered, and then immediately regretted it. Her expression clouded, and she looked so vulnerable I wanted to drop-kick whoever made her feel like that.
“I need the Manet,” she said quietly.
“Colette,” I said with a sinking stomach, “what did you do?”
“Why do you assume I did anything?” she shot back defensively.
“We think it’s the original,” I said, ignoring her outburst.
“Who the hell is ‘we’? You and I are ‘we,’ not you and Cipher man, or whoever you’re sharing a bed with.”
She was hurt, and I’d just poked a stick into the wound. I took a deep breath and started again. “I met with Cipher man and his bosses today. Sterling’s dad fired them, so they’re not actively trying to bust me, but they do want whatever we can get about why Markham Gray might have a stolen Manet hanging on his wall.”
Colette closed her eyes as the fight seeped out of her. “I asked Sterling why his dad was freaking out so much about the painting. He said he didn’t know, but that it looked like there’d been another painting behind it.”
“Did you tell him we had it?” I asked.
Her eyes flew open. “No! He still doesn’t know about you. He can’t, because then he’d know we stole it.”
“But …” I prompted, and Colette closed her eyes again.
“His father knows something. I don’t know what, but something,” she whispered. “Sterling took me to meet his dad for lunch today. He was in town for a meeting.” She took a deep breath for courage, I thought. “When Sterling left the table to take a call, Mr. Gray told me that he didn’t know how I’d done it, but he knew I was involved in the theft of the painting, and if I didn’t give him back what was his, he would plaster my naked butt on every billboard and in every interior design magazine in the city.”
Her naked butt. The butt she’d exposed to his security camera to give us both an alibi. “He’d do that to his own son?”
She barked a laugh that had no humor in it. “Apparently so. A Sterling Gray sex tape would probably help his career, but it would sink mine.”
I turned the stove off and poured the simmering hot chocolate into two mugs, then put a bag of gourmet marshmallows between us.
She scoffed. “You do have good marshmallows.”
“No point in bad wine, cheap chocolate, or crap marshmallows.”
She dropped two of the cubes into her cup and raised it to toast me. “Truth.”
“I’ll figure something out,” I said as I blew across the top of my drink.
Her eyes got wide. “What?”
I shrugged. “Not sure yet. Some variation on what we did before, probably.”
She wrinkled her nose. “I’m not going on camera again.”
“No, but you guys go out, right?”
“Yeah, sometimes.”
I gave her my best side-eye. “Just sometimes? Are you sure you’re not just a booty call for the guy?”
“He introduced me to his dad,” she said, defensive again.
“Who proceeded to threaten you when he conveniently left to take a call.” I sighed. “Sterling Gray was supposed to be the booty call. You were going to love him, leave him, and never take another call from him again.”
“I like the way he treats me,” she said. “He thinks I’m funny, and he’s interested in things I have to say.” She took a sip of her chocolate and pondered the melting marshmallow. “It may not seem like much to you since guys always treat you like a real person, but he sees me for more than my face and my body.”
She’d surprised me. I needed a minute to think about her words, so I took my cup and walked over to the window that looked down into the garden. The only thing moving down there was my neighbor’s cat.
I thought about the Disney prince – how he laughed at my jokes and rolled with the crazy things I said. He argued against my self-deprecation and said he loved the random bits of trivia I knew. I felt seen and known and understood in his eyes. It was a heady feeling.
“I get it,” I said, turning back to Colette. “It’s addicting to feel like a whole person in someone else’s eyes.”
“You’re a whole person to me, Sister,” she said. “I always feel a little anemic next to you.”
I scowled. “You’re the beauty, I’m the badass. Or maybe more accurately, you’re the princess, I’m the thief.”
“You do realize we’re identical twins,” she said.
I turned to look at Alex’s painting of us. “I know Alex meant this painting for Mom, but I really like it. Even though she didn’t know us, I feel like she kind of got who we are.”
Colette came to stand next to me, sipping her chocolate. “It’s weird that she didn’t finish the edges though. I mean, how hard would it have been to paint them?”
I looked at her in surprise, then I put my cup down and took the painting off the easel. “Let’s do it. What should I use to get this off its stretcher?”
“A flathead screwdriver to get under the staples.”
“There’s one in the kitchen drawer, and I have black paint and brushes in the medicine cabinet.”
She scowled at me, opened her mouth, then shook her head. “Nope. Not going to ask.”
Colette handed me the screwdriver and then went for the little tub of black acrylic paint I kept in the bathroom for face painting when being a panda or a skull was called for.
I laid the painting face down on the rug and started pulling up the staples. Colette held out her hand for the staples as I pulled them, and in a few minutes, I’d removed them all. We carefully peeled the canvas back from the wooden stretcher. “I have newspaper to put on the floor—” My voice trailed off as I saw tiny words, handwritten in the distinctive architectural writing of Alex Kiriakis, revealed around the entire canvas as we pulled it free.
“Is that—?” Colette began.
“A message from Alex,” I finished.
The words had been perfectly placed so they were directly behind the one-inch-wide wood and therefore invisible until the stretcher was removed.
“Where does it begin?” Colette asked as I threw away the staples and got a flashlight.
I knelt next to her. “Here,” I said, shining the light on a small infinity sign in the upper left corner. I read out loud as I deciphered the writing.
“If you have retrieved our painting from Markham, you will have found the Manet. He believes it is the real one. The Gardner heist was his plan, but he wasn’t in charge and had to follow orders about what to take, so to get anything for himself, he had to make sure it was never reported. Sophia’s copy of the Manet was the perfect cover for stealing the original, and I made some bad choices for love. I was to finish her edges, which I did, and switch the paintings in the annex, which I didn’t, though I told him I did. He’s a vindictive man, and I’m afraid he could go after your mom if he discovers my lie and thinks I told her about his role in the robbery. I stayed away from all of you to protect you from my mistakes. Please tell Sophia I always loved her, and I’m so sorry.”
I met my sister’s shocked eyes, knowing mine looked the same. “He can’t know we know about any of this,” I said.
“I think Alex was right about Markham’s vindictiveness. If he knew he was duped, he could still go after Mom. We know he’s capable of it, and since she painted the forgery, it’s his word against hers that she wasn’t involved in the heist itself.” Colette looked genuinely afraid as she worked through the ramifications.
Hysteria bubbled up through my chest and came out as laughter. “Holy heist, Batman, I have to put the painting back.”