Harley looked her way again after she finished talking and shot Rian a quick smile. That was very good, Rian mouthed to her.

As Harley sat back on her chair, the silver-haired lawyer leaned forward and opened his mouth to say something, but the woman representing the buyer stopped him. She gently lay a well-manicured hand on his forearm – her yellow suit jacket against the deep blue of his was a pleasing contrast, Rian thought idly. The man closed his mouth, pursed his lips and shrugged.

“I think we’ve heard enough about legal arcana that, quite frankly, I didn’t expect to learn when I woke up this morning,” the woman started to say, sending a small smile across the conference table. Harley and Rian chuckled in response. There was some shuffling of papers and shifting of chairs on the other side of the table.

“But I thank, you Ms. Barton Ash, for that comprehensive and surprisingly lucid explanation of why we are, apparently, mistakenly assuming certain things …” she continued.

Harley smiled at her when her voice trailed out. “It was my pleasure Ms. Crouch.”

“Frances, please.”

“Then it’s Harley, please.”

The two women exchanged polite nods.

The woman then gestured to her left, indicating the floor was shifting to the expert they’d flown in for the occasion. “But our negotiating position is not so much informed by the legal aspects of things as they are by the aesthetic or even cultural/historical dimensions of the object …”

Harley leaned closer to Rian, but continued to face the opposing side. She said under her breath, “You’re up, ace. They’re trotting out the big gun, now. Mine was just a fencing match – yours will determine whether we win or lose the day.” So I’m Leonidas? I thought I was just one of the 300?

Under the table, Rian felt Harley’s pinky bump against her hand. She linked her pinky with Harley’s and whispered into her hair, “Who run the world?”

“GIRLS!!” Harley wrote on the clean legal pad that she’d set down on the table when the meeting had started earlier, emphasizing the word with two underlines.

After Frances concluded her short introduction, the Egyptian expert asked for the lights to be dimmed, and, to the surprise of both women, a powerpoint presentation appeared on the screen that had rolled down from the ceiling.