"She says you kept her from having a career," Caleb said.
"I know."
"Did you?"
The question startled me. I considered telling him he should trust me automatically. Instead I thought about how often I'd asked Tessa to rearrange her schedule for my clients, and how easily I had treated my work as essential while hers could move. "Sometimes I acted like my schedule mattered more," I admitted. "That wasn't fair."
Caleb nodded. "Then own that. But it doesn't mean she gets to steal your father's cabinets."
I smiled despite myself. "Everybody keeps saying that."
"Because you keep trying to turn one mistake into permission for every other mistake."
We sat for a while watching the city lights beyond the windows. Caleb asked whether I missed Tessa. I told him I missed the person I'd believed she was.
Then I corrected myself. I also missed the person she had really been during good moments. We had shared four years of dinners, holidays, ordinary worries, and private jokes. The relationship hadn't become fictional because its ending was cruel.
It would have been easier to hate her without qualification. I wanted that sometimes. But grief is not obedient. I could be furious over the workshop and still remember the night she sat on a hospital bench with me while Dad was dying, holding my hand without saying anything. The memory didn't excuse what she'd done. It simply made the loss bigger.
On Wednesday, Miriam received a packet of commercial correspondence from Northline's legal department. Its lawyers were cooperating with the preservation request while reserving the right to dispute certain allegations. The emails showed Tessa contacting Adrian months before he met me in person. She described herself as my long-term partner and principal commercial adviser. She wrote that I wanted a discreet sale, away from my sister's objections and local publicity.
The messages made my skin go cold. Nora had never opposed a legitimate sale outright; she only wanted us to honor Dad's wish for an exhibition first. Tessa had turned that into a story about a controlling family member who prevented me from making decisions. In one email, she described me as emotionally overwhelmed by the prospect of selling and said she could handle the paperwork because I wanted to be spared the details.
Adrian answered with ordinary commercial questions. Did she have written authority? Were there insurance records?