Under the Egg

Thirteen-year-old Theodora "Theo" Tenpenny lives with her reclusive mother, Angelika, in a crumbling centuries-old townhouse at 18 Spinney Lane in Manhattan's Greenwich Village, surviving by scavenging discarded items and growing food in the backyard garden. A few months earlier, she found her grandfather Jack lying in the street, fatally struck by a vehicle. With his dying breath, he told her, "It's under the egg," urging her to find a letter and "a treasure" before it was "too late." Jack's death leaves Theo effectively alone: Angelika is a math savant who has spent over 15 years on her NYU dissertation and cannot manage daily life, and Theo's father is a grifter whom Jack chased away years ago. When the Department of Veterans Affairs terminates Jack's pension, the household's only cash is $384 in a Mason jar.

Every morning since childhood, Theo and Jack chose the finest egg from their henhouse and placed it on the mantelpiece beneath a small painting Jack made, a dark abstract with a white oval resembling an egg. Since his death, Theo has searched nightly for whatever might be "under the egg" but found nothing. One evening, a mouse startles her so badly that she knocks a bottle of rubbing alcohol onto the painting. The top layer of paint wipes away, revealing a Renaissance-style Madonna and Child underneath, with a bird in flight and a Latin inscription.

Theo's years of museum visits with Jack allow her to recognize the painting as likely Italian Renaissance and potentially very valuable, but she grows anxious: Jack worked as a security guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the painting may be stolen. Her neighbor Anne-Marie Dumont, a Frenchwoman who runs the tea shop next door, demands payment for Angelika's tea bill. Relief arrives when Theo meets Bodhi Ford, the daughter of movie stars who have just moved onto Spinney Lane. Bodhi is eager for genuine friendship, and Theo impulsively tells her about the hidden painting. They take it to Grace Church, where Reverend Cecily, a British Episcopal priest, translates the Latin inscription and notes that the verse's "healing angel" corresponds to the archangel Raphael, asking if the painter rings a bell.

Theo recognizes the connection: The painting's style matches that of Raphael (Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino), one of the three great masters of the Italian Renaissance. On Reverend Cecily's recommendation, the girls take the painting to Cadwalader's, a Madison Avenue auction house, but their contact, Augustus Garvey, has left for the day. His associate Gemma dismisses the painting as a likely forgery and refuses further testing. Theo resolves to become her own expert.

While Bodhi spends two weeks in Morocco, Theo researches at art museums including the Met and the Frick Collection, and at the Jefferson Market Library, where a new librarian named Eddie submits a request for Jack's military records. Theo learns that Raphael used his mistress, Margherita Luti, nicknamed La Fornarina (the Baker's Daughter), as a model for his Madonnas, and that the Madonna in Theo's painting shares La Fornarina's features. Sanjiv, a street vendor who formerly taught chemistry in India, explains that oil paint polymerizes, or chemically hardens, over centuries, confirming the bottom layer is genuinely old while Jack likely used newer, removable paint on top.

When Bodhi returns, the girls visit the Met. Both note that their painting matches Raphael's technical style but carries a strikingly different emotional tone: deep, sad, and human rather than idealized. Theo realizes Raphael's portraits of real people captured flaws and emotions, raising the possibility that their painting is a portrait. In the galleries, Lydon Randolph, the elderly former head curator of European Paintings and Jack's former boss, encounters the girls. When Bodhi mentions Raphael, Lydon grows agitated and accidentally reveals that the museum's recently missing painting is a de Kooning, a 20th-century abstract work. The girls flee, realizing the hidden painting was not stolen from the Met.

Jack's military records reveal he enlisted after Pearl Harbor, was captured by the Germans, and spent a classified period in early 1945 before being assigned to the Monuments, Fine Arts, and Archives program, a group of soldiers who rescued European art from Nazi looting. Jack and his commanding officer, Lydon, evacuated masterpieces from a salt mine at Altaussee, Austria. Bodhi discovers that X-rays of another Raphael portrait revealed a hidden wedding ring on La Fornarina's finger, proving a secret marriage. She fakes an injury to access a hospital X-ray, and the scan of their painting reveals the same ring on the Madonna's finger along with a hidden third figure: a man painted out behind the mother and child. Theo identifies this figure as Raphael himself by comparing it to his known self-portrait. The painting is a secret family portrait.

Lydon visits the Tenpenny house, searching for the painting and telling Theo about a different missing Raphael from a Polish collection seized by the Nazis. He calls Theo "the granddaughter of a thief" and threatens to return with a warrant. Bodhi's research reveals that Jack's classified period corresponds with internment at Berga, a secret Nazi slave labor camp. The girls visit Morris Novak, a fellow survivor, who describes Max Trenczer, a Polish-Jewish art dealer from Paris who constantly spoke of a painting of a bird, a mother, and a child. Max traded the painting to a Nazi officer to save his young daughter, Anna, from Drancy, a transit camp near Paris. Max's wife was killed at Auschwitz, and Max died during a failed escape from Berga alongside Jack.

On the ferry home, Theo realizes she misheard Jack's dying words: not "and a treasure" but "Anna Trenczer." His final wish was for Theo to find Anna and return the painting. Angry and reluctant to give up the last thing Jack left her, Theo avoids Bodhi for days before relenting. Eddie's colleague Goldie, an archivist at the Center for Jewish History, searches Holocaust databases and finds that Anna was signed out of Drancy by a Nazi officer known to leave convents alone, suggesting she was hidden under a new name. When Lydon returns with police and a search warrant, Theo and Bodhi hide the painting through a connecting door in Jack's bedroom that leads into Madame Dumont's adjoining house. The police find nothing.

When Theo slips through the door to retrieve the painting, she finds Madame Dumont on the closet floor, clutching the canvas and weeping. Madame Dumont is Anna Trenczer. She has no conscious memory of her birth name, having been delivered to a French convent as a small child and baptized Anne-Marie Dumont. She later immigrated to New York and ended up at the boardinghouse next door, which Jack had arranged with a relief agency to shelter young refugees, hoping one might be Anna. Since Anna remembered nothing of her former identity, the search failed. Seeing the painting unlocks her buried memories.

Madame Dumont observes that the child in the painting is not sleeping but dead. Theo grasps the full meaning: The child is "risen yet unrisen," ascending before he could grow up. Raphael painted this unidealized portrait to memorialize his son; after Raphael's death, workshop assistants painted out his self-portrait and covered the ring to protect his reputation. The painting proves impossible to sell because no institution will risk millions without consensus on the attribution, so Madame Dumont keeps it in her tea shop and waives Angelika's tea debts. At a viewing party that fall, the community Theo has built gathers, and Augustus Garvey offers Theo an afterschool internship at Cadwalader's. On Thanksgiving, Theo discovers a hidden compartment in the mantelpiece containing at least $100,000 and a letter from Jack. Jack explains how he found the painting in Hitler's art collection while serving as a Monuments Man. Distrusting the museums' willingness to return looted art, he altered the painting's records to read "damaged beyond repair" and smuggled it home. He spent 60 years searching for Anna and failed, charging Theo with completing his mission. His postscript tells Theo she is like a chicken: someone who digs in and never stops scratching until she finds what she is looking for.