“I’m not a lawyer. I guess you can go to court, right, and be granted possession, but maybe that takes time, or, who knows how stuff might fall through the cracks, and wouldn’t it be better to know where they are now?”

Boone spoke up then. “Has anyone else seen them? Sacha?”

“I have seen pictures of them.”

“And?”

“They appear to be genuine.”

Boone turned to me, stone-faced. “Why don’t you tell us what you want.”

“I don’t want you to sell her house.”

More of the muttering. “I want to keep her . . . spirit alive. Make sure the world remembers her and her poems.”

“We all want that,” Doug said. “You don’t have to give speeches.”

I ignored him. “There’s something else, too. The Mathias poems? Mathias didn’t write them.”

That whole room full of men were all talking at once, roaring back at me. I nodded to Sacha and she stood up and began passing out the printed copies from my phone photos. One page showed a Mathias poem in typescript, then there were several pages of the handwritten notes. “What are we looking at?” Larry asked, once everyone had settled down.

“Drafts of a Mathias poem in Viridian’s handwriting. You can see her whole process, how she crossed out a line or a word and came up with a variant, how the poem changed and evolved. They’re very detailed.”

Sacha said, “I certainly found them convincing. There are a lot more. They cover some of his known poems, and the last, unpublished ones, the ones he burned. Remember, those were submitted in the court case, they can be verified.”

“She wrote them all,” I said. “But she kept it secret.”

Boone said, “That’s nuts. She wrote love poems to herself?”

“Like, a ventriloquist act. Why not.”

“But why write them in the first place?”

“Pick your own reason,” I said. “Because she loved him and wanted to help him? He wasn’t writing any more, he was too far gone. Because he made her do it? Anyway, it wouldn’t be the first time a man took credit for a woman’s work.”

None of them wanted to explore that last one. Doug said, “He burned them. He didn’t mean them to survive.”

“Maybe because he was ashamed of himself. Maybe he wanted to hurt her. Again, pick your own reason.”

“She could have told everybody after he died, it’s nuts that she didn’t.”

“No, it’s not. Maybe she was embarrassed. Maybe she didn’t want to undermine him, she felt guilty. Or, like you’re doing right now, people would think the poems weren’t as important because they were hers.”

Nobody said anything to that.

I said, “Anyway, she’s telling us now. She saved them. She was proud of them. She knew they were extraordinary.”