Sign the resignation letter, Margaret, or I’ll make sure every gallery in this city

I did not go to the archive. I went to the basement vault, the one Brandon had never bothered to learn the code for because his father always said the real work happened below ground. I opened drawer 14-C and took out a slim manila folder I had kept current for nineteen years: provenance records, insurance riders, and the original 1987 acquisition contract for the Degas sketch Brandon had just accused me of stealing. The sketch he claimed was missing had never belonged to Sterling Auction House. It had been on loan from the Beaumont Estate, and the loan agreement, signed by Brandon’s own father, required written notification to the family before any internal investigation. Brandon had skipped that step. He had also skipped the part where the sketch had been quietly returned to the Beaumont family eight months ago, logged by me, countersigned by the estate’s attorney, and photographed for the archive. I walked upstairs with the folder. Brandon was already pouring champagne for two junior partners, toasting what he called “long-overdue housekeeping.” I set the folder on the table next to his glass. I told him, in the same soft voice, that the Beaumont family had been searching for a new auction house ever since his father passed, and that their attorney was a personal friend of mine. I told him I had emailed her on my walk up the stairs. I told him she was three minutes away. Brandon’s face went the color of old parchment. The junior partners set their glasses down very carefully. By the time Eleanor Beaumont’s attorney walked through the door, the board chair had already been called, the resignation letter Brandon forced from me had been torn in half, and Brandon was the one being asked to clear his desk. I went back to my office. I straightened my cardigan. I picked up my pen, the good one his father gave me in 1994, and I started cataloging the next lot. Quietly. The way I always had.