I nodded. "You'll have it."
"And Mr. Price?"
"Yes?"
"Don't try to recover anything through confrontation. If someone contacts you offering to return documents, tell us and your attorney. We can only protect the evidence we know exists."
She handed me the incident number. I put it in my wallet beside an old photograph of Dad standing outside the workshop on its opening day. Looking at those two pieces of paper, I understood that the day ahead wasn't going to give me a dramatic confrontation or immediate relief. It was going to give me the slower, more difficult work of proving what belonged to whom and how another person had tried to change that.
By late afternoon, Miriam arrived with a junior attorney and began reviewing the documents. The transport company had secured the remaining pieces in the workshop and agreed to cooperate with any appropriate preservation request. Nora and Malik had completed a preliminary inventory. The most urgent problem was no longer the removal of the furniture. It was the missing archive, the forged consent, and a paper trail that appeared to have been prepared long before our weekend trip.
I stood in the middle of the workshop and tried to remember when Tessa last asked to see the original commission notebook. There had been so many ordinary conversations, so many little requests framed as favors. Could she borrow a key? Could she scan an old invoice? Could she photograph a signature so a gallery could prepare sample documents? I'd said yes because those requests came from the person I imagined would someday be my wife.
At seven that evening, after the freight crew had gone and the last police interview ended, Nora found me beside the arched table. I was staring at a scratch on the underside that Dad had left intentionally, a little pencil line preserved beneath the finish so he'd remember where a brace should go. She put a hand on my shoulder.
"Don't do that," she said.
"Do what?"
"Look like you're trying to blame yourself for every decision she made."
I shook my head. "I gave her access. I trusted her with everything."
"You gave someone you loved a key. That's normal. Taking things that don't belong to her wasn't."