Where Love Remains

Valeria

The drawer would open four inches and no farther. Leandro had placed a square of felt under the handle, as if the furniture might respond to consideration.

It was later in 2027, months after the Geneva examination and its independent review. Keller's index finding had led to further catalog comparisons, not a ready-made address. Those comparisons had brought them to this collection. The narrow slip was a separate object; the original plate remained under its custodians' arrangements, its age unresolved.

“You could help,” he said.

“I am helping. I'm preventing you from pulling harder.”

He stepped aside. Valeria knelt, moved the felt, and looked beneath the runners. A paper label had curled into the gap. She eased it free with the edge of a clean card. The drawer slid toward her so suddenly that she had to catch it with both hands.

“An inherited talent,” Leandro said.

Her father would have objected to that. In his workshop, nothing became a talent until it had survived a great deal of uninteresting practice. She checked the joint before setting the drawer on the padded table.

Across the room, Vivienne raised one finger. Her recorder lay between two empty specimen stands.

“I had that running for the drawer. May I keep the conversation?”

“You should have asked for a better conversation,” Leandro said.

“Is that yes?”

“Yes.”

Valeria agreed too, provided nobody identified the object from the recording before they had identified it in the room. Vivienne wrote something on a small card beside the recorder. She had inherited Anneliese's concentration, though not her way of making concentration look like a rebuke.

Morning light reached the high windows without reaching their table. The collections store occupied the least attractive part of the building: old radiators, a sink that dripped into a stained basin, cupboards whose locks had outlasted their keys. Valeria liked it. Nothing here arranged itself to persuade a visitor.

Leandro's catalog sheet was unusually neat. In the months since the argument over the first plate, he had become reliable at work that produced neither introductions nor applause. She sometimes suspected that he wanted her to notice. She noticed anyway.

“This is the reference from the revised index?”

He turned the sheet toward her. “Cross-reference, not an accession number. I followed it into the old cabinet list. That gives us this drawer.”