Nolan had brought the storage box down from his attic before I arrived on March 17. It sat on his apartment table beside a dish of wrapped candies, its lid bent inward under an old cord. He had loosened the knot but left the contents untouched, as though my presence might give the opening some authority.
"I nearly threw this away last year," he said. "You can tell me afterward whether I should have."
I asked for space to make three piles: documents already copied, material new to our review, and papers unrelated to the collection. He fetched a tray for the last group. There were household bills among the cellar papers, and he didn't want them disappearing into my work bag.
At first we moved briskly. An envelope yielded copies of receipts I recognized from his folder. I matched the dates and amounts against my list while Nolan opened a second packet. He passed me a letter with visible anticipation. It was the same family account I had read at my desk, with a different fold down the middle.
"A second copy doesn't give us a second source," I said.
"No. I suppose it doesn't." He placed it on the duplicate pile himself.
We found photographs, a maintenance bill and cards from suppliers. One card named a wine but recorded neither a purchase nor a transfer. Nolan remembered hearing his father discuss the sender. I wrote that recollection on a separate sheet, read it back and asked whether I had represented it accurately.
"You make it sound so frail," he said.
"I'm trying not to make it sound like something else."
By noon the tray of unrelated papers was full. The pile of new supporting material was small, and none supplied the missing purchase history. Nolan stood to make coffee. I offered to finish another envelope while he did it, but he said he wanted to see everything I opened. We waited for the kettle together.
When he returned, he didn't sit. "Tell me something directly. Do these charges mean my bottles are false?"
I put down my pencil. The March 8 announcement had described allegations against Kurniawan involving rare wine and a loan. I told Nolan that charges were not a conviction, and that the announcement did not establish anything about his collection. Nothing we had examined connected his property to that prosecution.
"Then are you telling me they're genuine?"
"No. Those aren't the same question. I can't establish authenticity from an unrelated person's arrest, and I can't establish it from the absence of a connection either."
He lowered himself into the chair. "You sounded certain before there was a box on this table."
I had already acknowledged that reputation had influenced my estimate. At my desk, that admission had still allowed me to sound like a diligent professional improving her process. Here, beside the duplicates we had hoped would rescue it, I needed to say what my earlier words had done.
"I told you I stood behind the estimate before I had checked enough to support that assurance. I also told you nothing about the collection was in question. That was too broad. The documentation was already a question; I simply hadn't done the work to see it."
He asked whether the sixty-to-eighty-thousand-dollar range was now worthless. I said an estimate was not a promise of proceeds, but I should have made its basis and limitations clearer before he relied on it. I couldn't responsibly replace it with another confident figure that afternoon.
"I told my daughter," he said. "I started making plans."
"I know you told her. You told me that when we met." I stopped there. I did not know the rest of his plans, and asking him to describe them now could sound like a request to measure how much forgiveness I needed.
He turned my notes toward himself and read the headings. Then he asked for a written explanation: what I had seen, what his family had said, what remained missing, and what I was withdrawing from my earlier assurance.
"Not a catalogue footnote," he said. "Something addressed to me."
I promised him a signed account. We put the papers back in their original envelopes, with the duplicates identified on removable slips. He kept the box; I took only the copies he authorized. At the door he declined my offer to call on Monday with a preliminary summary. He wanted to read the finished letter before speaking again. I left with a smaller task than restoring certainty, and no permission to pretend it was the same one.