“I'm sorry to ask, but would you initial each page? My lawyer is fussy about initials.”

Quentin Hargrove slid the contract across the kitchen table with two fingers, as if the paper might bruise. The lake had fogged the windows from the outside, and a plastic bucket under the sink caught a drip every four seconds.

Ines did not take off her gloves to sign. She never did. The pen left a faint gray smudge on the white cotton of her right index finger, and she noted it the way she noted everything: minor surface soiling, recent, removable.

Clause nine was short. The Appraiser shall not open, unseal, or otherwise disturb sealed correspondence found on the premises; such items are to be catalogued by exterior only.

“Standard,” she said.

Quentin touched the brass hearing aid behind his left ear, turning it up or pretending to.

“Forgive me. Standard?”

“Clause nine. Estates are full of letters nobody should read. I tag them and move on.”

“You're very kind. My uncle kept a great many.”

His cardigan had a moth hole at the elbow the size of a dime, and he worried it with his thumb while he watched her initial the last page. She wrote I.O. in the corner, twice, because the first one skipped.

The upstairs study was locked. Quentin climbed ahead of her, one hand on the rail, apologizing to the stairs, to the stuck door, to the smell of wet plaster. The key he used was steel and modern and entirely wrong for the old mortise, and it took him three tries.

“I'm sorry. It sticks in the damp.”

The room was cold enough that she could see her own breath once, near the window. Every book on the shelves stood with its spine turned to the wall, so the room showed her nothing but pale page-edges, hundreds of them, like teeth. Orange auction tags hung from the lamp, the chair, the coal scuttle. Someone had already numbered the furniture.

The desk was walnut, scarred deep along the front edge where a wrist would rest. She set her case on the floor and began at the left drawer. Lot 14, a box of steel nibs, rusted. Lot 15, a magnifier with a cracked handle. Lot 16, a ledger with the first forty pages razored out, the stubs clean.

The right drawer held one envelope.

Cream, handmade, the fibers standing up from the surface like the hair on a forearm. Her name was on it in brown ink, Miss Ines Okafor, the I looped the old way, the way they taught it in schools that had closed before she was born. The wax was deep red, and she knew the crest before her eyes had finished reading it: the heron, the three stones, the little crooked bar her father had always said was a mistake by the engraver and refused to fix.

The edge of the wax ran uneven, wavy, pushed out on one side. Pressed fast. Pressed by someone who heard a car in the drive.

She wrote Lot 17 on a tag. Her pen did not move after the seventeen.

The drip from the kitchen should have carried up through the floor. She had been hearing it the whole time without knowing, every four seconds, and now there was nothing, only the lake breathing against the glass.

Her hands hovered over the seal. The gloves were good cotton, fresh this morning, and she watched the fingertips of both of them shake, a fine fast tremor, the kind she would have written up on a painting as active flaking, unstable.

“Miss Okafor?”

Quentin stood in the doorway. She had not heard him on the stairs. His eyes went to the envelope, then to her hands, and stayed there.

“I'm so sorry. Is it something of mine?”

She set the envelope on the walnut, square to the scarred edge, the way she would set down anything fragile and expensive.

Then she took hold of the cotton at the tip of her left middle finger and pulled. The glove came off slowly, one finger at a time, inside out, and the cold of the room went straight into her skin. Her hand looked smaller than she remembered. There was a pale band across the knuckles where the cuff always sat, and an old ink stain on the side of the thumb that had never fully worn away.

She laid the bare palm flat over the wax.

It was colder than the paper. She could feel the heron under the heel of her hand, the ridge of its neck, and with the pad of her ring finger she found the crooked bar. Her father used to tap it with his pencil when he was thinking, three taps, and she had hated the sound at the breakfast table.

The shaking stopped. Under the hand, at least.

“Miss Okafor, I'm sorry, I don't mean to hover.”

Quentin had not come in. He stood with both hands on the doorframe, his cardigan sagging off one shoulder, and he was looking at her bare hand the way people look at a dog that has gone very still.

“Condition report, Lot 17. Envelope, handmade laid paper, one. Wax seal, intact. Addressed by hand.”

“Addressed to whom?”

“It's sealed. Clause nine. Exterior only.”

“Of course. Forgive me. I only wondered, because my uncle didn't know many people. Toward the end.”

“He knew one more than you thought.”

She had not meant to say it. Quentin's thumb found the moth hole at his elbow and went in up to the first knuckle.

He came two steps into the room, which was the most she had seen him move without apologizing first. Then he remembered.

“I'm sorry. The floor is uneven there, mind your case.”

She minded her case. She did not lift her hand.

“Whose crest is that? I've never seen it. I thought I knew every piece in this house.”

He said it gently, almost bored, and she watched him not look at the heron. He looked at the window, at the orange tag on the coal scuttle, at the ceiling where a brown water stain had spread like a map of a country nobody visited. Everywhere except the wax.

A man who had never seen a crest would look at it.

“Provenance unknown,” Ines said.

“I see.” He touched his hearing aid. “I'm sorry, I didn't catch that.”

“Unknown.”

On the shelf behind him, between two spine-in volumes, a brass compass sat closed on a saucer, tagged and numbered in someone else's hand. Lot 22. She had noticed it coming in and meant to get to it. Now, with her palm on her father's heron, she could have sworn its lid stood open a crack it had not had before, and that the needle inside lay not toward the lake, which was north, but along the line of the shelf, toward the desk. Toward her.

She looked away first.

“I'll need to stay late,” she said. “The inventory runs longer than your lawyer thought.”

“Stay as late as you like. I'm sorry there's no heat up here.” He backed toward the door, then stopped. “Miss Okafor. If something in that desk is private, I'd rather it stayed private. For everyone's sake. I'd pay you for the inconvenience.”

She pressed her hand down until she felt the crooked bar cut a line into her palm.

“How much is everyone's sake worth, Mr. Hargrove?”

He smiled at her with his whole stooped body and went out, and a moment after his steps faded on the stairs, the kitchen drip started again below them, every four seconds, as if someone had just turned the tap.