They were already camped on the steps when Maya pulled up — bodies with lenses, sleeping bags tossed like flags, coffee cooling in paper cups. Flash units like small suns.
Maya walked through them. No point hiding. The front doors opened and the heat of the crowd shoved at her shoulders. Cameras angled, phones raised. She kept her face blank, because people read panic like a script and then sell it.
Tess met her at the lab door, hair in a mess, eyes red-rimmed and hard. "They want you out," Tess said without preamble. "Board's talking. Donors are calling. One of them, Hargrove, said he'll pull his endowment if the museum doesn't distance itself."
Maya hardly registered the names. Her throat felt dry. "How loud are they outside?" she asked.
"Loud enough to drown out a diesel truck," Tess said. "And Hargrove's right-hand called. He said it's a liability."
Maya's hands went straight to the workbench, more for habit than comfort. A frame lay open, a flaking canvas lifted on pins. Restoration work was precise and slow and safe. It had nothing to do with tabloids. That's why this was worse: a job that required patience could be ruined with a single splash of malice.
"Sit down," Tess ordered. She did. Tess paced, then jabbed at her phone. "I'm pulling strings. I told the board we can weather this. I said you're clean. I told them that they'd need you."
"Need me how?" Maya snapped. Anger was faster than fear. "Need me for what? Brush strokes?"
Tess rubbed her forehead. "We have donors who love the story of the museum — the underdog fight, the community classes. They don't want scandal. They want tidy. They said: 'Could we not make the museum a war zone?'"
Before Maya could answer, Eleanor Graves, board chair, swept in. Eleanor moved like someone used to people bending around her. She still had that perfect smile at first, but it fell quick when she saw the lab bench.
"We have to call an emergency meeting," Eleanor said. "We have to evaluate risk. For the museum."
Tess opened her mouth. Maya closed it. Board evaluations were less public than headlines but far more lethal. Jobs vanished in them. Projects were slashed. Names were moved into files that froze forever.
Eleanor didn't pause. "I want a full audit of your restorations from the past eighteen months, Maya. Please bring every file."
Maya's breath stuttered. "An audit? Now?"
"Now," Eleanor said. She looked at Tess. "We can't have the museum tied to accusations of impropriety."
Maya tried to keep her voice even. "Eighteen months is absurd. You know our processes. You know the lab—"
"We also know what a scandal does," Eleanor said, sharper. "If Hargrove pulls funding, the museum doesn't just cancel a gala. We cancel programs. We cancel jobs. Think of the junior interns, Maya. Think of the funding for school tours."
It was a weapon aimed low. Who could argue with school tours? Who wanted to be the person who put kids' field trips at risk?
Tess grabbed Maya's arm. "We'll figure this out. I called Marcus; he says he can help with PR."
Maya barely heard the name. Marcus hovered like a shadow in the periphery of her life, the sharp suit, the adviser to Liam Voss. He was a man who fixed reputations for a living. That was not comfort. It meant the problem had teeth.
A courier arrived while they still argued. He was small and red-faced, a business envelope clutched like contraband. Tess opened it like a present that might explode.
Inside: a dossier thick with glossy prints, a lab-style report, annotated notes, pages torn from a restoration log. The cover had no return address. Someone had walked it in and left it like a trap.
Tess flipped the pages with white-knuckled fingers. "What the hell."
The report accused Maya of forging a restoration on a piece the museum had purchased two years earlier, a small, high-profile object that had drawn attention at the last auction. The dossier cited inconsistencies in varnish pH, pigment grain patterns out of place, and a signature on the restoration log that allegedly did not match Maya's handwriting.
Maya looked at the pages and felt a thin film of cold slide down her spine. The handwriting was familiar; she recognized the slant, the way a lower-case g hooked. It was her head of lab's old notes, not hers. It was familiar in the wrong way.
"This is bullshit," she said.
Eleanor did not say the word "forgery" out loud. She didn't need to. She put the dossier on the table.
"You understand how it looks?" she said. "We have to be careful."
Maya's mouth tasted metallic. This was not just a smear about a night she had thought private; it was an attack on her hands, her name, the slow careful work that kept paintings breathing. A conservator's career was a record of trust. Break that, and everything fell.
"You think I forged a painting?" Her voice was small now.
Tess slapped the table sharply. "No. But they'll print it either way."
The gallery phones started ringing then — angry donors, a junior curator crying on the line, someone from the city arts council asking for comment. The museum became a hotline for damage control. Maya's inbox filled with threats, questions, and a comment thread where strangers debated what she'd done.
Maya scanned the dossier until something made her freeze. Buried among images of microscope slides and chemical curves was a photo that didn't belong in a lab report.
It was the same photo the tabloids had used — the shot of her on a white duvet, half-covered, Liam's cuff loose around her wrist. But this version had been printed at a different angle. The photographer had framed further back. The mirror at the head of the bed reflected more of the room. In the reflection, across the doorway, a figure sat in a dark chair: someone leaning forward with knees together, hands folded. Not blurred. Clear enough.
Maya knew the face before she told herself she did. It was someone who'd been in the gallery two nights ago, watching the gala. Someone who had a name on a donor list. Someone who had signed a check to the museum.
Eleanor's eyes dropped to the same glossy print. Her fingers twitched.
"No," Tess breathed.
The room grew very quiet. Cameras outside clicked like tiny guns. The volunteers stopped whispering. The air in the lab held its breath.
The woman in the reflection lifted a hand to her mouth in the photo — a small, private gesture. Eleanor's cheeks had gone hard. For a second, she looked younger, the lines around her eyes softening.
"Eleanor?" Tess said, because careful etiquette demands named things.
Eleanor did not answer immediately. She swallowed. Her jaw moved like a trapdoor. "That's from the gala," she said finally. Her voice was lower now, thin as paper. "I remember that night. I remember that face."
Maya's chest knocked against her ribs. Recognition is not always a friendly thing. Sometimes it's a hook into a net you don't see until you try to run.
"Who is it?" Maya asked. The words felt small and brittle.
Eleanor's mouth opened. For a heartbeat she looked like someone considering a confession and then backing away. "It's someone who knows how to hide in plain sight," she said. "Someone who… sits where no one expects and watches."
Her eyes flicked away and met Maya's like a warning or a test. The dossier lay between them, a paper bridge across a canyon.
Someone in the background recognized her. The word moved through the room like a bullet. Not an accusation. A recognition.
"Someone in our house," Maya said.
Eleanor's shoulders jerked. She turned her face away as if a camera had caught her at an unscripted moment.
Tess's phone buzzed again. Another donor had promised funds on the condition the museum suspended operations until "clarity" emerged. The board chair cleared her throat.
"We'll meet at eleven," Eleanor said. "All of you. Bring everything."
Maya clutched the dossier as if it might bite. She thought: you sign a contract to stop a scandal, and then the people around you start to look like the ones who set the fire.
Maya folded the page over, careful not to tear. She had a meeting in two hours, a list of restorations to bring, and a dossier that smelled like poison. She had signed her name to a six-month lie to keep the museum standing.
She had no idea which one of the people aroun
d her had already decided she was expendable.
And that thought made her move faster than she'd planned.