Dante seemed tired. Yesterday his anger had lit the restaurant; in daylight it had left shadows under his eyes.
“Mr. Henderson had no right to fire you because of me,” he said before sitting down.
“He had every right to terminate my employment under the applicable rules if he followed them,” Selene replied. “Whether he did is a different question.”
“I can make him hire you again.”
“I don't want a job handed back to me by somebody he fears.”
“Then what do you want?”
“To have the option of refusing you and still paying my rent.”
Dante absorbed that. Mara slid a prepared document across the table.
It separated the work into stages. An initial authentication review would be paid at a professional consulting rate regardless of results. Any full translation would be independently assessed by two scholars selected jointly. The public reward of ten million dollars would be placed in escrow, with a narrowly defined trigger: a substantially verified decipherment of the full text, not a specific outcome favorable to Dante. Selene would retain her notes and could consult her own attorney. She could stop working if threatened. She would not agree to secrecy about evidence of crime.
Dante read it carefully. Once, he looked at Selene.
“Most people ask for a guarantee that I won't hurt them.”
“It's in section eight.”
His eyes returned to the page. “You made it enforceable.”
“I didn't,” Mara said. “The law is supposed to. If your representatives interfere with her, the independent trustee releases the documentation and suspends your rights under the agreement.”
Dante glanced up. “You think I'll sign this?”
“I think you invited the entire restaurant to witness your promise,” Mara replied. “We're offering you a respectable way to keep it.”
After a long moment, Dante picked up the pen.
Selene expected a dramatic flourish. He only signed where Livia had placed the tabs.
Then he said, “I know what the newspapers said about you.”
She held his gaze. “So do I.”
“I don't know if it was true.”
“It wasn't.”
“I'll judge your work by what it proves.”
“Good. That's how scholarship is supposed to work.”
Livia unwrapped the manuscript from an archival sleeve and placed it under a clear weight. Its surface was brittle, its lines uneven. Selene set her own lamp at a low angle, photographing the page before she moved a thing.
Within twenty minutes she had noticed two alterations to the public narrative Dante had brought into the room. The first was physical: the supposed ancient ink sat on paper made with a much later fiber blend. The second was linguistic: the repeated fishhook was a copying convention found in nineteenth-century field notebooks, not a character from an unbroken ancient dialect.
“Your father didn't write this in Oscan,” she said. “He was using someone else's transcription of it. Probably on purpose.”
Dante leaned forward. “Can you read it?”
“I can test a key. But not yet.”
“Because I need to know how he obtained the source notebook. Whoever copied these marks was looking at a particular reference. Not a book you could simply purchase.”
She placed the scan beside a photograph from her private research folder. The same split fishhook appeared beside a drawing of a harbor wall.
A date had been written below the earlier photograph: 1998.
Dante saw it. “That year means something.”
“It was the year nineteen dockworkers died in the Pier Nine warehouse fire,” Selene said. “My old research archive included a private ledger from the families' relief fund. Professor Kessler told me the manuscript was a harmless merchant exercise.”
Dante's jaw tightened. “My father owned that warehouse.”