The summons arrived at the Crystal Palace's exhibition management office on the morning of the third day, addressed to Raymond Vance in the Academy's official cream-colored paper with the Exposition committee's secondary seal — not the Grand Prix seal, the administrative seal, the one that meant procedural rather than ceremonial.

Raymond showed it to her without comment. She read it: a request for a clarification session with three members of the Exposition committee, regarding *the compound mechanisms employed in the demonstration of the apparatus registered under reference number 4471-C.* The session was scheduled for ten o'clock the following morning. Attendance was described as *requested but not compelled.*

*Not compelled* was the administrative language for *we cannot require you but declining will be read as avoidance.*

"Viviane," she said.

"Yes."

"She couldn't block the shortlisting. She couldn't prevent the presentation. This is the next instrument." She folded the summons. "The committee has three members. She needs to have reached at least two of them."

"The wording of the request suggests at least two," he agreed. "The third member may be genuinely curious rather than primed." He looked at the folded summons. "The question is what she's given them."

This was the question. They had spent the past twenty-four hours aware that Leonard's revelation about Auguste had not resolved the broader situation — Viviane's network was extensive and her timeline was not yet exhausted. The newspaper article had failed to produce the social effect she had intended. The Grand Prix shortlisting had outrun her procedural objections. She had one more move before the final vote, and the move was this: the clarification session.

"I'll attend with you," Adeline said.

Raymond looked at her. The quality of his look was the one she had been learning to read since the fourth day, the one that was doing complex processing behind a surface that appeared to be considering a technical problem.

"I don't want you in the session," he said.

She looked at him.

"Not because I can't handle it," he said, before she could respond. "Because I know what Viviane has prepared. She's prepared something that's about me specifically — about my professional history, about the self-experimentation period, about the Academy. If you're present, she shifts the target. She has material about you too, about the counterformula, about the dynamic between us. If we attend separately, she has to choose which target to use, and if she uses both she dilutes the impact. If we attend together she uses both simultaneously and they reinforce each other."

She processed this. It was technically correct — the strategic analysis was sound, the logic was clear. And it was also, she could see it happening in real time, the thing her father had told Raymond not to do: managing what she was exposed to without her agreement.

"You're making a unilateral decision about how I participate in something that directly concerns me," she said.

"I'm making a recommendation based on my assessment of the strategic situation."

"It's a recommendation delivered as a statement of intent. *I don't want you in the session* is not the same as *I recommend you consider not attending.*"

He was quiet. She watched him be quiet in the specific way he was quiet when she had said something accurate that he was integrating.

"You're right," he said.

"I know the risks of attending," she said. "I can assess them myself. And I can also tell you that the risk of you going into that session alone — the specific risk of what it will do to you, to be in that room without someone who knows the full story — that risk is real too. It's not in your strategic assessment. You're not including it because you're the one who carries it."

He looked at her for a long moment.

"What happened with Voss," she said. "What happened in the Academy. You went through all of that alone. And the going-through-it-alone is part of what shaped the wound. I'm not going to let you go into a room designed to evoke that situation without me there, because the strategic argument for going separately is also the argument for doing it the way you've always done it, which is alone." She held his eyes. "And I said I wasn't going to let that happen again."

He was very still.

"This is exactly the thing," she said. "Isn't it. The thing we both do. We protect the other person from the fire by walking into the fire alone."

The gallery was around them, the Crystal Palace doing its morning thing with the light, and the machines and instruments of two dozen other exhibitors were in their positions, and outside the building Florence was awake and conducting its business, and none of that was the thing that was happening in this specific conversation.

"Yes," he said. "That's the thing."

"Then we stop doing it."

A pause. Long enough to have meaning.

"Together," he said.

"Together," she said.

The session was the next morning. They spent the rest of the third day managing the Exposition's public requirements — visitors, press, the ongoing technical inquiries from the international jury — and in the evening, at the equipment table after the public had gone, they worked through what Viviane was likely to have prepared, what the committee would ask, and what the correct responses were.

Not scripts. The work of two people who were going into something difficult and were choosing to go in knowing what they knew and trusting each other with the knowing.

At nine o'clock she said: "You're not having the session you had with the Academy. That's a different room with different people under different conditions. What happened then is what happened then."

He looked at her across the equipment table.

"I know," he said. "Tell me again tomorrow morning. Before we go in."

"I'll tell you," she said. "And Raymond." He waited. "If I speak in that room — I'll give you a second. The way you asked."

Something moved through his expression. Not relief — recognition. The recognition of someone who had been heard in the full sense of the word, in the sense that what they had said had been received and was being acted on.

"Thank you," he said.

They left the Crystal Palace together and walked back through the city in the particular quality of an evening before something difficult: not afraid, not resigned, simply present with what was ahead and what was alongside it.