Daniel had insisted on the figure because zero looked spiteful. One dollar, he’d told his attorneys, looked generous.

Now he sat frozen in the blue light of his phone while messages began arriving from colleagues, clients, reporters, and people he hadn’t spoken to in years.

Is this your Evelyn? Did you know? Call me immediately.

Daniel barely noticed the questions. He was staring at the photograph of the painting.

It was called The House That Swallowed Her. A solitary woman stood in the center of a grand white dining room while the walls curved inward around her like ribs.

At the far end of the table, a faceless man raised a wineglass to guests whose heads had been painted as empty frames. Above them, a narrow staircase climbed toward an open sky.

Daniel recognized the staircase. He recognized the dining room. He recognized the woman. What terrified him most was that he recognized himself.

For seventeen years, Daniel Mercer had told Evelyn her paintings were worthless. Now the world had put a value on one of them, and for the first time in his career, Daniel had no argument ready.

Chapter 2 — The Attic

Their marriage had not begun cruelly. That was the truth Evelyn would later force herself to remember.

When they met, Daniel was twenty-eight — exhausted, ambitious, still carrying his law school textbooks in a backpack with a broken zipper. Evelyn was twenty-six, working mornings at a bookstore in Providence and painting at night in a borrowed studio above a laundromat.

She had been one semester from finishing her degree when her mother suffered a stroke, and she’d returned to Connecticut to manage the appointments, the bills, and a house her mother could no longer maintain alone.

Daniel admired that about her then. “You make sacrifices without making everyone watch,” he told her on their fourth date. At the time, it sounded like praise.