Tessa Brindle's office was on the third floor of a Philadelphia building with a slow elevator and a stairwell that smelled of coffee. There were no framed certificates on the walls, only two small drawings and a great deal of empty space, and she cleared a felt pad on a long table before she would let me unwrap anything.
She looked to be in her forties, in flat shoes and a grey sweater, and she worked slowly. She turned the canvas over first, before she looked at the front of it at all, and studied the back of the stretcher with a small flashlight held at an angle.
"Tell me where it's been," she said. "Not the whole family history. Since your mother."
"My mother's house in Cherry Hill," I said. "In a back bedroom behind a shelf of books. Wrapped in a quilt. Until Monday I didn't know it existed."
She nodded as though I'd handed her a piece of the answer and not all of it. Then she put the flashlight down and said the sentence I had come for and did not get. "I'm not going to price this today, and I'm not going to advertise it, and I'd ask you not to let anyone else do either until we've settled a question."
"It's been in the house forty years," I said. "Doesn't that count for something?"
"It counts for a great deal and it proves nothing." She pulled a chair out for me and waited until I sat down. "And you just told me you didn't know it existed. Do you know it was there forty years, or does forty years belong to the books?"
I looked at the quilt folded beside the felt. "The books," I said. "The house. I don't know how long the painting was there." It was the first thing I had said that morning that made me feel poorer, though she had not offered me a dollar.
"Then that's where we start." Tessa took a sheet of paper and wrote my name at the top. "An inheritance explains how something came to you. It doesn't necessarily explain how it came to the person who left it. Have you found a receipt? Correspondence? An inventory with a description?"
"We haven't finished the house." I wanted her to understand that the papers might be waiting, obediently, in the next drawer. "My brother's doing most of it. There are files in the dining room."
"Look through those. Don't write a history from memory to fill the space. Bring what you find, even if it doesn't seem important." She drew a line under the questions. "I also want to check some records before we speak again."
I asked whether the signature meant anything. She said it meant there was a signature. I almost laughed, but she wasn't being clever. She was keeping me from carrying home a sentence she hadn't said. When I asked if she thought it was genuine, she said that was not a conclusion she could give me that morning.
My phone rattled against the table. Caleb had finished a kitchen nearby and wanted to know whether we could discuss the house before he went back to Cherry Hill. I told him where I was. Tessa asked whether I wanted him included. I said he was only coming to collect me, which was not what he had offered.
While we waited, she helped me fold the quilt around the canvas without pressing against its face. She gave me a written request for records, not an appraisal. I put it in my handbag behind the receipt with the rent written twice on it.
Caleb came in carrying his coat over one arm. My brother could look as though he had arrived to mend something even when he was empty-handed. "Well?" he said. "Are we retiring?"
"She needs paperwork," I said. "Before she can put a number on it."
Tessa didn't contradict me. She looked at me, and the room seemed to hold that look longer than it should have. "Before any proposed sale," she said, "we need to address the records question."
Caleb nodded. "There's a drawer full of insurance stuff. You want Saturday?" He was asking about the search, not the painting. I said Sunday, because I had lessons Saturday. He began telling me about the cleared cupboards and the boxes he needed me to mark.
I could have told him then that this wasn't ordinary paperwork, that Tessa had stopped the thing I had already begun spending in my head. Instead I asked whether he had saved the dining-room files. He said he had saved everything with writing on it because he knew what I was like.
In the elevator he asked if I wanted to try somebody else. The button for the ground floor glowed between us. I pictured another table, another person willing to say a number before asking questions, and felt how easily I could call that a second opinion.
"No," I said. "I'll bring her the records."
Outside, I sent Iris a message saying there was no figure yet and more paperwork was needed. Nothing in it was false. I read it twice before sending, which should have warned me. Then I put the phone away and helped Caleb settle the wrapped painting in the car.