Page 161 of Nobody Told Me Thrift Shops Sell Stolen Dragon Heirlooms

Quinn looked at me as if I had skipped several important steps in the moral panic. “You’re suggesting to outbid Dimitris?”

“Yes.”

“That is many millions of dollars.”

“I understand.”

She stared another moment, then started laughing into her hand.

I looked at her. “What?”

“I’m sorry,” she said, though she was still smiling. “It’s just that we were building a whole legal siege tower, and you walked in with a checkbook trebuchet.”

“A trebuchet is not precise.”

“That is your issue with what I said?”

Moira leaned back in her chair and exhaled. “Well, shit. If the client is solving our litigation problem with philanthropy and spite, I’m ordering extra crab rangoons for lunch.”

In the end, Arkley accepted a restricted preservation grant tied to conservation obligations and an ethical provenance review fellowship. The comb returned to my family immediately. The museum kept its doors open. Dimitris Burelian acquired nothing but, I hoped, indigestion.

That evening, I carried the comb to the room where the necklace and shrine mirror now rested. The altar no longer looked temporary. My father had found a length of silk in my mother’s cedar chest, and I had mounted the mirror myself, leaving its damage visible.

My mother traced the comb’s repaired silver tooth with one fingertip. “My mother wore this when she married your father.”

The generations had tangled, but the feeling had not.

“Then we’ll keep it here until you want to wear the reproduction,” I said.

She nodded and placed the comb beside the necklace. I stayed after she and my father left, adjusting the case twice before admitting that no arrangement would make the loss orderly. It only made the return real.

For one brief, dangerous week, progress felt almost possible.

Then the fifth relic disappeared into the records.

The team found false leads in Prague, Scotland, and two private collections hiding behind shell entities so obvious even Cressler began taking them personally. Payton & Wallace contracted investigators, provenance experts, and one archivist who seemed to consider sleep a rumor spread by less committed scholars. Every Monday, the conference table filled with binders, timelines, coffee, and the expensive lunches I had arranged after discovering that several members of my legal team considered crackers a meal. And by several, I meant Quinn Bradley.

Quinn was usually in the center of it.

She was alert and indispensable in ways that were increasingly impossible not to notice. She remembered details other people misplaced, caught contradictions in acquisition notes. She asked why one object had been translated as ceremonial when the family records suggested domestic use. She still took notes. She still fetched coffee when someone asked. But everyone paid attention when she spoke.

I had grown used to that.

I had also grown used to Max’s absence, though not gracefully. It was absurd to miss a dog in litigation strategy meetings. Max didn’t belong under a conference table while attorneys argued over provenance gaps and acquisition chains.

Still, twice, I caught myself looking toward the door when Quinn entered, expecting to see him at her side.

On the fourth Monday after the Arkley agreement, I arrived at Payton & Wallace ten minutes early.

Quinn’s chair was empty.

Her legal pad wasn’t beside Moira’s laptop. There was no blue pen aligned with the edge of the table, no coffee cup with her name written in her blocky handwriting, no quick professional nod that pretended she and I hadn’t flown over Manhattan together and then gone back to speaking in careful tones in rooms full of lawyers.

“Where is Ms. Bradley?” I asked.

Moira’s expression changed.

Helena closed the folder in front of her. “She went home.”