“Still stuck in Pennsylvania,” he said, shaking his head. “They’re going to be there until tomorrow at least. My uncle feels so bad about the key thing. He keeps apologizing.…”
Cary kept talking, but his voice faded to background noise, because I’d seen something the moment his door had swung wide.
It was like how you can see just the side of someone’s face for a fraction of a moment and recognize them. How a second of a song or movie clip is enough to recall the whole thing. How a blur in your peripheral vision is enough to make you jump back from the curb and avoid the bike barreling toward you.
This was like that. It was seeing something I’d been searching for my entire life, even if I didn’t know what exactly it would look like. It was familiar and unfamiliar, and even though it was just a flash, a moment, I knew it.
And so I walked up to Cary’s room and pushed the door open, startling him—he’d been hunched over his desk, writing something. But I didn’t care if I was being rude, because that half second had been enough to let me know I was right.
I had always thought that New York Night number three would be in blue. But it wasn’t. It was golden.
Hanging on the wall in front of me was Hugo LaSalle’s lost painting. It was right there.
I’d found it.
“Hi,” Cary said, sounding surprised. “Sorry—I’m almost done. If you need to go, I can hurry.…”
I didn’t respond, just walked closer to the painting. I didn’t think it was a fake. Nobody had ever seen this before, so how would it be? But it was also just obvious this was a LaSalle. The size, the brushwork, the signature in the corner with a crown over his first name—it all fit. In all the speculation about what was in this painting, I’d never guessed this—that the third canvas in the series shifted perspective slightly. The skyline was still there, but we were now more with the people on the ground. Couples holding hands. People walking dogs. Parents and children. Friends. Dwarfed by but also somehow a part of the New York skyline.
It was beautiful.
“Oh—yeah,” Cary said, smiling as he came to stand next to me. “Nice, right? My dad was on a moving job for this guy, transporting his stuff from Pittsburgh to New York, and he gave him this. My dad used to joke that next time, he was going to ask for a cash tip. He would always say it was the only time he’d ever been paid in art. My uncle didn’t want me to hang it in here and damage the walls, but I don’t know… I just liked the colors.”
It was all coming together, like puzzle pieces snapping into place. That was why I’d recognized the name on the moving truck—it was Cary’s. Which meant, against all odds, that the mover story about the painting had been true—but I supposed one of them had to be. I let out a long, shaky breath, then sat down on the perfectly made bed with its plaid comforter. “Cary,” I said.
“Yeah?” He looked at me, now clearly a little bit concerned. I wondered if I should ask him to sit down too. It was like I finally understood why, in plays and movies, people are always being told to sit before getting big news.
“That painting,” I said, pointing to it, “is a Hugo LaSalle.”
Cary frowned, like he was trying to place something. “The… artist?” he asked, then shook his head. “Nah,” he said. “It was just some guy in a studio in Pittsburgh.”
“It’s a LaSalle,” I said. “It’s his famous lost painting. I know because my family’s been trying to find it for twenty years.”
Cary looked at me, then at the painting, like he was trying to figure out if this was just some very elaborate and not-that-funny prank. “No,” he said, a little faintly, and I could understand it—the instinct to hang on as tightly as we can to the world we understand before it all goes topsy-turvy.
“Yes,” I said, on the verge of breaking into hysterical laughter. All the searching, all the years looking for it, and it had been in an apartment in Murray Hill, owned by a teenager who just liked the colors. From all I knew about LaSalle, he would have absolutely loved this. “It is. I’d heard the mover story, but nobody ever knew if it was true.”
“But,” Cary said, sounding more scared than anything else. I understood it. When your life’s about to change, even with all good things, it’s jarring. But you have to go through it to get to the stuff on the other side. “Hugo LaSalle… I mean, he’s famous.”
“I know,” I said, not able to stop myself from smiling now as I stared at it. It didn’t seem like Cary was going to have a problem paying for college—or much else—for a while. “Listen, you should absolutely do whatever you want. But I know my mom would love to have the chance to make an offer for her museum. She’s been looking for this for so long.”
Cary sank down on the bed next to me, looking a great deal paler than he’d been just a few moments before. “Are you sure?” he whispered.
I nodded. “Yeah,” I said. We both looked at the painting in silence, and in that moment, it stopped being something hung on a bedroom wall. If you squinted, you could see it in a gallery, on the wall of a museum, a small white plaque next to it, as people grouped around and looked at it with their heads tilted to the side.
Cary shook his head. “Holy shit.”
I burst out laughing. Because what else could you say? I smiled at him. “My thoughts exactly.”
I’d been worried that I’d been too long—that maybe the driver would have left, or called my dad and told him that I’d disappeared. But the town car was still waiting, hazards on, wipers going against the snow. I let myself in before he had to get out in the cold, and just as I closed the door, I saw Cary also hurrying out of the building, carrying a helmet, looking like a man on a mission. I hoped it was to his job and not a late-night art appraiser—I wanted my mom to have a chance to at least bid—but he had the right to do whatever he wanted.
“Sorry,” I said, putting on my seat belt. Then I tucked the folded note that Cary had written for Kat carefully into my clutch.
“Not a problem,” the driver said, giving me a smile.
“I’m Stevie, by the way.” It felt like our interaction had been going on far too long to continue without introductions. I was also regretting that town cars didn’t have the drivers’ names displayed like taxis did.
“Leo,” he said with a nod. “Ready to head to Connecticut? You warm enough back there?”
“Just fine,” I said, settling back in my seat. “Thank you.”
The car pulled out, and I looked out the window at the falling snow, at the people bundled up against it, at the way it seemed to be making New York even more magical. I was still trying to sort through what had just happened. You somehow expect decades-long mysteries to be solved painstakingly over time, not discovered by random accident because a cute boy has a crush on your best friend. And yet…
I leaned back against the soft leather of the seat. It was undoubtedly a much more comfortable way to get from New York to Connecticut than Metro-North. But I couldn’t help feeling this wasn’t how I was supposed to end the night. I was supposed to be riding with Kat on the uncomfortable seats, nudging her to move her feet every time the conductor passed so we wouldn’t get kicked off.