“I touched her,” Matteo went on. “And for one second — attingo, we used to say — I reached not to the painting, but through it. I touched the man who had mixed that tempera in 1432. His hunger. His fear of the plague. His hope that someone, centuries later, would see Mary’s face and feel less alone.”

He did not think about conservation. He did not think about legacy. He thought about the anonymous painter in 1327, grinding lapis lazuli into powder, mixing it with egg yolk on a cold morning. He thought about the painter’s own hands — cracked, stained, mortal.

“Well?” she said.

“The pigment is friable here,” she said, pointing to the fresco’s edge. “Saint Sebastian’s robe. If you touch it, even with a dry finger, you’ll lift the azurite. It’s been dying for seven hundred years. Let it die in peace.”

Then he pulled back. A single fleck of blue clung to his fingerprint like a grain of sky.

Outside, Lena sat on the stone steps, pretending to read a book. She did not look up.

“I know them,” he whispered. His hand did not move. “I wrote half of them.”