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Iwas quite close to murdering the new guy. And because my boss and our CFO, Rowan Calvert, wasn’t aware of my homicidal feelings toward the new addition to the team, he had placed Bingham Fairwick with me.

“Breathe in through your nose and out through your mouth,” Terri Klein reminded me as she followed her own advice and practiced moving air in and out of her body slowly.

“Vellum is gross, am I right?” Bing—he’d told all of us to call him Bing when he was first hired two weeks ago—said as he took a seat on the tall stool beside me. “I mean, it’s made out of calf skin.”

I turned my head slowly back to Terri.

“I’m going to go make you some tea,” she said quickly, scrambling off her stool.

“Hey, what’s the name for when the paper is all jacked up with bulges or wrinkles again?”

“Do you mean the vellum?”

“Well, yeah, that’s what we’re talking about, right?”

I squeezed the bridge of my nose. “It’s called cockling.” I could hear the strain in my voice. “I thought you said you were going to start writing these down.”

“I did, in my phone, but Mr. Calvert said he doesn’t want cell phones out while we’re working. But how am I supposed to access my notes, then?”

“Perhaps write them in a notebook?”

“Like with a pen?”

I was certainly going to heaven for refraining from all the things I could have said.

“C’mon man, who writes anymore?”

I could feel my right eye starting to twitch. It wasn’t like writing was important to us or anything; it wasn’t like it was what we focused on at our auction house.

“I’d rather work with bones or jewels,” Bing said excitedly.

“Yes, well, do you know anything about either?”

He thought a moment. Like he actually had to stop and think. I was utterly astounded, and when I looked up, Marc Li was shaking his head.

“No, you’re right, that’s probably why they put me here.”

“And perhaps because Hudson’s, our auction house, only handles paper artifacts, from ephemera to personal correspondence to historical documents.”

“Really?”

Would anyone even notice if I bludgeoned him to death with my stapler? More importantly, would they care?

“I thought it would be more exciting to work at an auction house.”

He’d been here a couple weeks and had been hired, Donna in research told me, because he needed a job and our big boss, Mr. James Hudson, and Bing’s father, Mr. Fairwick, went way back. They had apparently been in the same fraternity in college. That hadn’t been enough to keep him in the research department, however. Donna said her colleague Paul, as well as Rohan, the third member of their team, had found his constant chatter a problem. Translation: both men had considered bludgeoning him as well.

“I mean, Sasha, it’s supposed to be quiet,” she’d growled through gritted teeth when she dropped him off two days ago.

And now here I was, sitting there, answering questions. Or more to the point, the same questions. Again.

“So when did everyone start using parchment paper?”

I glanced over at Marc, who pressed his lips together tight.

“Parchment paper,” I began, “is usually, but not always, pre-eighteen hundred, while vellum is pre-seventeen hundred. That’s the difference.”

“Okay. And what is the adversity paper you were talking about yesterday,” he asked, staring at me.