Page 106 of The Lies We Play

There is my digital stamp.

L. Crane.

The date is wrong.

Two years ago, that week, I was in Bologna. The entire week. Train tickets, hotel receipts, a photograph of me holding up a glass of Sangiovese at a dinner with the project team that I posted to my mother because she likes proof I sometimes participate in things involving outside air.

I search the institute’s archive.

The login shows my credentials accessed the file at 2:17 a.m. on a Tuesday. I make it a habit not to work at 2:17 a.m. unless something is on fire, bleeding, or emotionally significant enough to require snacks. None of those conditions applied two years ago on a Tuesday in March.

I pull up my calendar from that week.

Bologna. Mural site. Dinner with the project team. Hotel receipt. Train ticket. A photograph of me with sauce on my chin.

I was nowhere near the institute system.

Someone used my credentials.

My name. My work. My professional reputation. The thing I built across an ocean, in a language I had to learn, in a body that no longer worked the way I had been raised to expect it to. The thing I made out of the wreckage. The thing that was supposed to be mine.

Someone has been writing on it like it belonged to them.

A small, tidy anger begins in my chest.

Good.

Anger is useful. Unlike panic, anger can hold a pen.

I start a second document.

Irregularities.

Digital access time is inconsistent with known travel/location.

Provenance summary lacks supporting documentation for the 1938 estate sale.

Swiss private collection, unnamed.

1982 foundation acquisition recorded without an invoice scan.

Restricted charitable transfer clause references trust language not included in the packet.

H.W.S.C. signature appended to amended access protocol dated yesterday.

The foundation request seeks to restrict pre-restoration photographs, archive scans, and ownership documentation.

The list helps.

The list also terrifies me.

I stand, cross to the sink, and run water over my left wrist. Bella has gone mostly quiet, which is worse. Bella likes commentary. When she stops talking, it usually means my nervous system has moved from alarm into bunker mode.

“Okay,” I whisper. “Okay.”

My voice sounds too calm.

I hate calm when it is mine. It makes me sound like my father.