"That's true."
"I should have asked you directly."
I thought of Nora, Malik, Adrian, and everybody else who'd assumed someone else had checked. "What did you see?" I asked.
Melanie explained that Tessa had been borrowing to finance event deposits, travel, and speculative purchases she hoped to resell. Some expenses were legitimate business costs. Others were increasingly difficult to justify as contracts fell through. She had built an image of a thriving independent consultancy and spent money to maintain that image, even while the revenue behind it became unreliable.
"She kept saying the Riverlight deal would solve everything," Melanie said. "I thought she meant a commission you two had agreed on. Daniel, I'm sorry."
I didn't tell her it was fine. It wasn't. I asked whether she'd be willing to speak with Miriam and provide whatever records she could lawfully share. She agreed. Before ending the call, she said something that stayed with me.
"Tessa was terrified of becoming ordinary. She thought if she wasn't the woman in the room who knew the most interesting people, she would disappear."
I sat with that for a long time. I'd loved her energy because she made ordinary life feel bright. But perhaps she had come to believe brightness required constant proof: better hotels, better clients, better clothes, bigger deals, and eventually a man who represented the world she wanted to enter. The thought made her understandable. It didn't make her choices forgivable.
That weekend I received an invitation to a small exhibition-planning meeting from Dr. Irene Levin, the curator who first identified the Riverlight collection's historical significance. She was in her late sixties, with silver hair cut close to her head and an ability to ask questions that made people stop hiding behind professional language. I'd postponed meeting her several times while the crisis unfolded, but she insisted we needed to talk.
We met at the workshop on Sunday afternoon. Irene arrived with photographs from the original library opening and two boxes of catalog records borrowed from a local historical archive. She walked slowly among the eight pieces, looking at them with the attention Dad had once given to a promising board. When she reached the arched table, she rested her hand on its edge and smiled.
"Samuel always argued that this wasn't furniture," she said.
I looked at her. "You knew him?"
"Briefly. I interviewed him years ago for a preservation project. He said he was building a place for people to feel welcome. The furniture was simply how he did it."