Her eyes filled with tears as she walked through the house, trying to be practical about it. She clung to thoughts of Mike to give her strength. She wanted to call him, but felt too emotional to do so. She had decided not to bring an assistant with her. She wanted to be alone in her final hours in the house and not have to talk to anyone. She had brought her driver and one of her bodyguards to help her carry things that were too heavy for her. The DGSE agent assigned to her had followed them in a chase car, as they always did now, since Mike had convinced Guy Thomas to provide protection for her. The poisoning had proven him right. There was no question about it now. It made her wonder again what had happened to Pierre de Vaumont and where he was hiding, and from whom. He had been noticeably absent from the Paris social scene for over a month now. Guy Thomas had said several times that he could be dead, and Robert Richmond didn’t disagree with him, but Theo thought it unlikely. He was probably just hiding somewhere, maybe afraid he’d be blamed for poisoning her, and he was waiting for the storm to blow over.

The movers arrived an hour after she got there. She got them started, and told them which paintings to take down. She scolded them immediately when they began doing it without gloves. They were professional movers and she told them they should have known better. One of them rolled his eyes, and the others did as they were told. She was removing nineteen paintings from the walls, and got her bodyguard to rehang some others, so the rooms didn’t look odd with empty spaces on the walls. The paintings she was taking were on a list as “excluded from the sale.” She wanted everything to look perfect when the new owner showed it to his wife for the first time. She had even bought new kitchen towels and a few things to replace the old ones. She had tried to think of everything, to help prepare the gift.

She had marked with stickers and colored dots each of the paintings that were going, and the movers began putting them into wooden crates, as she walked slowly up the stairs to the bedrooms. That would be the hardest part for her.