Isolde sat in the attic and tried, again, to lift the list. Her fingers passed through the paper like smoke through a screen. The list was her father's. He had written down every painting he ever finished, and beside each title he had noted who took it after he died. Some names she knew. Most she did not. She had been counting the names for years now, the way other girls might have counted birthdays she never reached. The attic held the rest of her small life. A black stuffed horse with floppy legs slumped against a crate, its mane still wild from the last time she had carried it. A framed portrait of her leaned beside it, painted when she was seven and already sick. Her father had painted her more than anyone. He had told her so, often, while he worked. He died without selling a single canvas. She died before him. Neither of them had ever been seen the way they wanted. Below her, the museum was quiet. Its walls were filled with other people's paintings. They should have been her father's. This building used to hold his work and a ring of carousel horses, and he had painted both, sometimes together, sometimes only her on the painted horse. Now the curator who ran the place could not see Isolde, no matter how close she stood. Cordelia walked the halls alone, deciding what would hang next. Isolde had three weeks, maybe less, before the empty walls were promised to someone else. She had tried the usual things. She had slid a cold hand through Cordelia's wrist in the tapestry hall. Cordelia had only rubbed her arm and kept walking. Isolde had gathered herself into a cluster of pale orbs, dim as dust caught in a lamp, and drifted toward the attic hatch. Cordelia had watched the orbs from her desk. She had not followed. Isolde had failed at every quiet trick a ghost is allowed. She looked again at the list, at the portrait, at the horse. She could not lift any of them. But Cordelia could, if Cordelia ever climbed the ladder. Isolde pulled herself thin and went down through the floor to the office. She gathered what was left of her into the orbs again and let them settle on the desk, directly on top of the open ledger Cordelia kept her acquisitions in. She held the shape there. She made the orbs stay until Cordelia looked up from her tea and set the cup down slowly. Cordelia studied the orbs for a long moment. She did not speak. She stood, took a flashlight from the drawer, and walked toward the tapestry wing, toward the crack in the wall and the ladder behind it. Isolde followed her up. For the first time, someone living was climbing toward her father's list.

The hatch lifted and lantern light spilled into the attic. Cordelia climbed through with the black cat tucked under one arm. She set the lantern on a crate and let the cat down. Isolde stood between the easel and the chair where she had posed as a child. She did not move. The lantern swung, and Cordelia's eyes found her at once. Cordelia froze. The cat did not. It walked toward Isolde with its tail up. Isolde lifted one thin hand. "Don't be afraid," she said, though she was not sure her voice carried. She thinned herself out before Cordelia could run, scattered into nothing, and pulled back against the rafters where she could only watch. Cordelia stayed where she was for a long moment. Then she picked up the lantern. The light moved across her father's things. It found the grey easel first, still standing, cobwebs strung between its arms. It found the carved chair beside it, the seat worn where Isolde used to sit for hours while he worked. It found the floppy black horse slumped against the crate, and beside the horse, the portrait of Isolde at seven, and the folded list of paintings. Cordelia knelt. She lifted the list, read it in the lantern light, and put it in her coat pocket. Then she looked at the portrait for a long time. She did not take it. She stood and climbed back down with the cat at her heels. Isolde sank to the floorboards. She had been seen. A living person had finally seen her, and she had sent her away on purpose so she would not lose her. Cordelia had taken the list. That was something. That was more than years of trying. At two in the morning the hatch opened again. Cordelia came up alone this time, without the cat. She walked straight to the portrait, wrapped it in a cloth she had brought, and carried it down the ladder. Isolde followed her as far as the office and watched her lean the portrait against the desk beside the carousel painting. Two of her father's works, side by side in lamplight, in a room where a living person would see them every day. The list named every painting. It did not name the painter. Isolde stood over the canvas and pressed her palm flat against the back of the frame. The wood went cold under her hand. She remembered him at the easel, brush in his teeth, telling her to keep her chin where it was. She remembered the chair under her, the dust in the window, the sound of his name when her mother called him in for supper. She knew the name. Cordelia did not. Isolde would have to find a way to give it to her.

Isolde drifted back to the office at dawn. Cordelia sat at her desk between the two paintings, the list flat under her hands. She kept turning it over, checking the back, the corners, the margins. She looked at the carousel painting, then at the portrait of young Isolde, then at the list again. She shook her head and pushed the list away. Isolde knew that look. She had worn it herself for years, standing beside her father's canvases, waiting for someone to say his name. Cordelia stood and walked to the cabinet by the wall, a dusty black thing with drawers stuffed past closing. She pulled one open and dug through folders. Acquisition records, donor cards, old receipts. She read a few, frowned, and shoved them back. No painter matched. No signature on the canvases. Without a name, the two paintings would stay labeled as curiosities by an unknown hand. Isolde turned away from the desk and noticed the glass case in the corner. Inside sat a single black carousel horse on a stand. She had passed it a hundred times. Now she remembered the shipping crates her father used to ship that horse and others like it. She remembered where they had gone after he died. The basement. She slipped through the wall and down. The dark wood door at the bottom of the stairs had two carousel horses carved into its face. She passed through it and stopped. The basement was full of her father's things. His old filing cabinet stood against the far wall, drawers swollen with paper. A stack of empty black frames leaned beside it, each one stamped with a small brass plaque: Frederick Vale. He had signed the frames when he refused to sign the canvases. Shipping crates lined the floor, his name burned into the wood. His painter's trunk sat open in the corner, blank stretched canvases still inside, waiting for work he never finished. Isolde stood in the middle of it and understood. Cordelia had been sitting on her father's name for years. She walked past it every week to check the boiler. The proof was here, under her feet, in her own building. The list upstairs named the paintings. The basement named the painter. She rose back through the floor into the office. Cordelia was closing the file drawer, ready to give up for the night. Isolde gathered herself into a single pale orb and drifted across the room. She hovered over the doorknob to the stairs, then sank slowly through it, then rose again. She did it three times. Cordelia stopped with her hand on the drawer. She watched the orb dip and rise. Then she picked up her flashlight, crossed the room, and opened the door to the basement stairs. Isolde slid down ahead of her, toward the frames with her father's name.