A novel in episodes — some letters wait fifty years to arrive. Some portraits wait a century to be seen.
Episode One — The Letter Never Sent
Clearing out her grandmother's cedar chest, Nora finds a letter written in 1974 — addressed to Adrian Voss, and never mailed. In a small Edinburgh bookshop she finds Adrian himself, silver-haired at sixty-eight, and his son Leo, who has come home after ten years away. Delivering the letter takes one afternoon. What it starts is another matter.
Episode Two — Wet Paint
A damaged 1890 portrait lands on Nora's easel — eleven minutes from the bookshop, purely by coincidence, she insists. Under the lamp her swab finds something wrong beneath the stern sitter's collar, and the X-ray shows a second portrait underneath: a young woman, laughing, hidden on purpose in 1891. Nora knows that smile. It's her grandmother's.