Soon, they all took their seats around the breakfast table. 

Bette and Tina had pulled their seats closer together, holding hands as they sipped from their tea mugs. 

“What’s on your mind, Bromwell?” Tina asked, encouragingly.  She still couldn’t place his face or voice, but something was telling her she had encountered him before. 

Bromwell turned his tea mug round and round on the table while he thought about how to open the topic he wanted to talk about. 

“I know you’ve been wondering about where we may have met before Tina,” he started. 

Bette and Tina looked at each other, eyebrows shot up. 

“And I wanted to explain where.” 

The couple looked at him expectantly.  Tina raised her tea mug, blowing into it to cool it down a bit.  Bette was picking up a Greek tea cookie to nibble on it. 

“I was the one on the other end of the call when some men had barged into your room one morning in Paris,“ he said quietly. 

His voice had been partly distorted the morning he’d talked to Tina, because he had been on speaker in the backseat of his limo, on his way to an airport. 

Tina banged her mug down on the table as she and Bette sat up alertly, both tensed as they looked back at the apologetic, chastened face of Bromwell.  They were stunned. 

What?!!  Tina shouted rising to her feet. 

“Sonovabitch!   Do you know what you put us through?!” she demanded, her face reddening.  Boy, she wanted to smack him! 

Bette reached out to Tina, smiling at her, and pulled on the blonde’s hand to prompt her to sit down. 

“Bromwell, needless to say this is really…the biggest surprise,” Bette said evenly.  “And not the most pleasant one.” 

“Let me explain,” Bromwell asked. 

“Please!,”Bette and Tina exclaimed. 

“One of my companies does security, and the contract at that time was for a group of museums.  They wanted to find out what had happened to some of the paintings that had been confiscated, because they were concerned that some of the paintings they had bought through the years may have come from that same horde of paintings."  

Bette’s face tightened as the memories of her involvement in the investigation into the paintings that she’d stumbled into over four years ago came flooding in.  Tina looked at her with concern.  The last thing they needed in their rebuilt lives was for Bette to be drawn in, once again, into that issue.  They’d managed to escape all that.  And Bette’s heart health could be threatened by the stress of all that, again.