Page 46 of All I Want for Christmas

‘You were doing it just now, reading the sports pages.’ She smooshed her mouth to the side in her best impression.

He laughed again, but this time shooting her a look as if she was drawing something from him against his will.

They sank into a small silence as their teases died down.

‘So, who’s your team? Let me guess – Copenhagen?’

‘Actually, AGF.’

‘Really?’

‘I went to school in Aarhus.’

‘Ah. Best days of your life?’

‘I sincerely hope not,’ he quipped. ‘Do you support a team?’

‘Not actively. My brother is a Chelsea supporter so I’m a proxy fan, I guess.’

‘You have a brother?’

‘Younger, by three years. And then a sister, seven years younger.’

‘So you’re an eldest child,’ he mused.

‘You say that ominously, the way people say they’re a Scorpio. Or a witch.’

He chuckled again.

‘You?’

‘...Just me. Can’t you tell?’

She supposed she could, now it was pointed out to her: the self-sufficiency, conspicuous maturity, self-possession...He didn’t look like someone who’d ever had to fight over sitting in the tap end of the bath.

Unless it was with a model.

She sighed, suddenly depressed again by the image, and he glanced at her. ‘Good?’

He meant the food, she knew. She nodded. ‘Great.’

Max was watching the match on his iPad, on the sofa, wearing his AirPods. Every few minutes he would wince at a foul, gasp at a bad tackle, groan at a referee’s decision, unaware of the sounds he was making into the silence.

She had moved onto the third box and was almost through it. Most of the material had been bulky but unhelpful – more auction catalogues that she could move through quickly and discount. A sense of worry was beginning to build. She had been wading through resources at the gallery’s archives for almost a week now and hadn’t unearthed a single clue as to this woman’s identity.

She sighed and sank back against the cushions. Her meeting with Otto was tomorrow morning. How could she tell him that a week into a five-week deadline, she had achieved precisely nothing? She hadn’t found a single useable fact.

‘Everything okay?’

She looked up. Max was watching her, one of his AirPods out.

‘Yeah, I guess.’

He glanced at the box, correctly identifying it as the source of her despair. ‘Still nothing?’

‘Nope.’

‘It’ll come.’

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