Nine Minutes

"It's a family photograph," I said, closing my fist around it before I could think better of it. "My family."

His gaze finally moved to my face, and something in it flinched, the way people flinch when a name lands somewhere old and tender. "Sebastian Thorncastle," he said, not offering a hand. "And you are?"

"Tamsin Adeyemi. I'm doing authentication work for the sale this week." I made myself hold still. "The woman in that photograph is Agatha Voss. She was dismissed from Thorncastle House in 1931. Accused of stealing that brooch."

"I know the story," he said, too fast.

"Then you know it was never proven. No trial. No police. Just a family deciding a girl was guilty and making sure everyone believed it."

For a moment I thought he might actually answer me. Instead he said, "Excuse me," and walked toward the far end of the gallery with his phone already at his ear, and I watched his shoulders go rigid the second the call connected.

I found Priya twenty minutes later in the registrar's office, elbow-deep in a box of condition reports. Priya Deshmukh had trained me on half of what I knew about provenance research, and she had the particular talent of looking unbothered right up until the second she wasn't.

"You look like you saw a ghost," she said.

"I think I'm related to one." I told her everything — the photograph, the brooch, Sebastian's face. She listened with her pen tapping against the desk, slower and slower, until it stopped.

"Tamsin." She turned her monitor toward me. On the screen was the lot management system, Lot 47 highlighted in amber. "That flag went up nine minutes ago."

I read it twice to be sure. Withdrawal requested — pending family authorization.

"Nine minutes," Priya said. "That's about how long it's been since you started talking to a Thorncastle."