On Friday I brought Tessa an envelope containing my mother's will, a household insurance renewal, and a photograph of the back bedroom taken while we were sorting books. I had chosen an envelope too large for the contents. It made a substantial sound when I put it on her table, and then lay almost flat.
She read what I had brought without pretending it answered her questions. The will named me, but not the painting. The insurance paper gave no useful description. She placed them beside the photograph and turned her computer so we could both see the screen.
"This is why I asked you to come back," she said. "It's an FBI public appeal dated June 30, 2016. I want you to read the date first. Then the description."
I read the date because she had told me to, as though I were a child starting a piece with the wrong fingers. The appeal concerned a Norman Rockwell painting stolen during a burglary of a home in Cherry Hill, New Jersey, on June 30, 1976. Beneath the words was an image I did not want to recognize.
"Ours has a boy," I said, and stopped. The boy on the screen had already made my sentence useless.
"There are three titles in the records," Tessa said. "Taking a Break, Lazybones, and Boy Asleep with Hoe. They refer to one painting, dated 1919. Three names don't mean three different works."
I leaned forward until the edge of the table pressed against my ribs. There was the hat, the resting shape, the long tool. I wanted a difference large enough to get through. A color looked unlike the color I remembered, but the screen was bright and my mother's hallway had been dim.
"Are you telling me it's stolen?"
"I'm telling you the resemblance requires a referral. I haven't authenticated your painting. I can't determine legal ownership, and I can't tell you how it reached your mother's house. Those are different questions. We mustn't use an answer to one as an answer to all of them."
I asked her to enlarge the picture. She did. It helped nothing. I studied a corner, as if enough attention to a small part might undo the whole. Tessa let me look. She didn't reach for the envelope or start explaining the importance of cooperation before I could breathe.
"My mother taught children," I said.
"You haven't been asked to make a judgment about your mother."
That was a kindness, but not the kind I had wanted. I wanted her to say there must have been an innocent explanation and to supply it, complete with a receipt we could eventually find. Instead she asked permission to give my contact information and the photographs to a recovery liaison she could approach.
"What happens if I say yes?"
"You can expect questions about what you know and what you have. I can't promise a result. His name is Owen Pell. With your permission, I'll ask him to contact you."
I thought about the other appointment penciled into my calendar. After Wednesday's disappointment, I had called about the possibility of selling through another office. I had described a family painting and accepted a time before deciding whether I meant to go. Keeping the appointment now would be a choice, not an oversight.
"Yes," I said. "You can contact him. But give me a minute first." I took out my phone and called the number in my calendar. When someone answered, I gave my name and canceled. Asked whether I wanted another date, I said I wasn't offering the painting for sale.
My voice sounded unnecessarily formal. I repeated the last sentence because I needed to hear that I had said it, and because the person on the other end had begun looking for another opening. Then I deleted the appointment while Tessa watched neither my screen nor my face.
She printed the dated appeal for me. I put it in the large envelope with the papers that proved so much less than I had expected. At the door I asked whether I should tell my brother. "Tell him what you know," she said. It was a smaller task than explaining everything, and harder.