In Our Secret Life

Nobody suspects the schoolteachers. You wouldn't have either.

In 1985, Willem de Kooning's Woman-Ochre was cut from its frame at the University of Arizona Museum of Art. Thirty-two years later, valued at as much as $160 million, it was found behind a bedroom door in a quiet couple's home. Every reporter circled the same disbelief: could two schoolteachers really have done it?

The headlines told you what was found. They could never tell you what was hidden.

IN OUR SECRET LIFE does not solve the case. It imagines the marriage behind it.

In 1955, Jerry and Rita meet in the Catskills: two pickpockets who know their own kind on sight. He sees theft as an art form, a lifted wallet and a de Kooning the same kind of freedom. She is the better thief, practiced at vanishing in plain sight. Recognition becomes a pact, and the pact becomes a marriage: fifty-seven years, two children, a hundred countries, and a life no teacher's salary could ever explain.

Of everything they ever took, only one thing stayed: a woman in ochre, behind their bedroom door for more than thirty years.

Rita tells it herself, moving backward from her final days, as the illness taking her memory threatens the secret she guarded her whole life. The mind that hid everything is now trying to give it away, and the woman who spent a lifetime making the world look past her is fighting, at the end, only to remember.

A love story. An art heist. A secret worth $160 million.

Because behind every headline is a marriage. And behind every marriage, a secret.

Includes a reading group guide.