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She gives me a skeptical look. “That wasn’t convincing.”

“It wasn’t meant to be.”

Her smile comes slowly.

I push away from the doorframe before I change my mind about the schedule.

“One o’clock,” I say.

“I’ll be ready,” Blaire replies.

I leave her there and head toward my own suite, already thinking about how little I want the next hour to be spent working.

By early afternoon, Blaire is already working inside the Geneva office. The collection rooms occupy the quieter side of the building, away from the main conference floors, with controlled lighting, long worktables, and rows of archival storage. I leave her there with the local collections manager while I spend the first hour in meetings upstairs.

When I return, she barely notices me.

She is standing at the end of one of the tables with three members of the Geneva staff gathered around her. Her jacket is off now, draped over the back of a chair, and the sleeves of her cream blouse are pushed neatly to her forearms. A catalogue is open beneath one hand while she compares it against a set of records on the monitor beside her.

“This attribution is still correct,” Blaire says, tapping one entry with her finger.

“The problem is the ownership sequence. London has the transfer listed two years earlier, and that changes where the provenance gap actually begins.”

The collections manager leans closer.

“So you think the London file is wrong?”

“I think one of the dates was copied forward from an older inventory,” Blaire replies.

“If you pull the prewar ledger, we can confirm it without guessing.”

The woman nods and turns immediately toward one of the archive cabinets.

Blaire moves on without hesitation. She does not overstate anything. She does not perform for the room. She asks precise questions, listens to the answers, and adjusts when new information comes in. Within twenty minutes, the entire staff is working around her as though she has been part of the office for months. I stay near the doorway longer than I intend to.

She is good. Exceptionally good. The realization lands differently here than it does in London.

At the estate, I am usually too aware of her mouth, her legs, the way she looks at me when she thinks no one else is watching. Here, with a room full of people relying on her judgment, the attraction sharpens into something else; Pride, perhaps.

Not mine to claim, but there all the same.

Blaire finally looks up and catches me watching.

“You’ve been standing there for a while,” she says.

“Have I?”

“Yes,” she replies, closing the file in front of her.

“Long enough to make everyone nervous.”

The collections manager laughs softly.

“I’m not nervous,” I say.

Blaire gives me a look that says she knows exactly what I mean.

I step farther into the room. “How is it going?”