Lena’s jaw tightened. She was a scientist. She had data. She had protocols. But she also had a memory: her grandmother, in a hospice in Palermo, reaching for a cheap print of Caravaggio’s Nativity . The old woman’s finger had traced the manger, the ox, the stunned shepherd. She had died that night. And Lena had washed the print with distilled water and a microfibre cloth, erasing the fingerprint as if it had never been.

Lena finally looked at him. She was young — thirty, maybe — with the clean, merciless posture of the new school. Laser tools. Digital mapping. Chemical stabilizers that smelled of laboratories, not linseed oil. She respected him. She also pitied him, which was worse.

He touched.

She had been wrong to do that.

She frowned. “Then why?”