"They're the only complete record of my father's work. Some of them have his handwriting on both sides. You don't scan and replace that with a PDF and call it the same thing."
Adrian nodded. "I understand."
"No," I said, more sharply than I intended. "You understand their value to a buyer. You don't understand why they matter to me."
He didn't argue. That made me angrier in a way I couldn't explain. I wanted him to reveal himself as a liar so the room would become simpler. Instead he sat across from me looking like a man who had gambled on someone else's trust and discovered the loss was larger than the commission he'd expected.
When the meeting ended, Adrian's attorney agreed to preserve the relevant emails and cooperate through formal channels. We did not shake hands. I walked outside into the cold morning air and stood on the sidewalk until my breathing slowed. There was a coffee shop across the street, the kind where Tessa and I had once spent an entire Sunday arguing cheerfully about whether we should repaint our kitchen.
I went inside, bought a coffee I barely wanted, and sat near the window. Eight months. A forged signature. A loan I hadn't known existed. My father's notebooks in an unknown storage facility. I had arrived in Chicago expecting a vacation and returned home to find that the last year of my life needed to be reread from the beginning.
Miriam spent the next week doing the kind of work that rarely appears in the satisfying version of a betrayal story. There were preservation letters, follow-up requests, phone calls returned at inconvenient hours, and legal explanations I didn't want but needed. She obtained a temporary agreement that neither Tessa nor anyone acting for her would transfer or dispose of the Riverlight pieces or associated original documents while ownership and authorization were disputed. The transport company confirmed it would not resume the job without clear instructions approved through counsel.
The storage facility Adrian had mentioned was real. It occupied a long, low building near an industrial park outside Pittsburgh and specialized in documents, antiques, and property belonging to clients who didn't want to keep everything on site. Miriam contacted the company with evidence that documents belonging to my workshop might have been placed there without authorization. The staff would not disclose another client's private account information simply because I called, which was irritating but proper. Through legal channels, however, they agreed to preserve relevant records and hold the disputed materials pending resolution.
I wanted to drive there immediately. Nora offered to come with me. Miriam told us to stay away and let the process work. She was right, but it was hard to sit in the workshop while a stranger's storage account held my father's handwriting. I'd spent so much of my adult life restoring what other people had damaged that waiting for someone else to protect the things I loved felt unnatural.
One afternoon I found myself repairing a client's nineteenth-century sideboard while thinking about the missing notebook. The sideboard had an uneven drawer that had probably been forced shut for fifty years. Somebody before me had sanded its edge, then sanded it again, until the drawer fit only when the weather was dry. I could have made a quick adjustment that day and sent it home. Instead I took the frame apart and discovered a warped runner causing the entire problem.
I stood looking at that small piece of wood and thought about Tessa. Our last months together had been full of little fixes designed to make the next week more tolerable. An apology over dinner.
A weekend trip. A promise to discuss marriage later. A joke whenever an uncomfortable question appeared. None of those repairs reached the part that had shifted out of alignment.
The thought made me angry with myself, then tired. I went back to work because wood, at least, behaved consistently. If I put pressure in the wrong direction, something cracked. If I repaired the source of a problem, the drawer moved smoothly again. Relationships were less predictable, especially when one person was quietly working from a different set of plans.