She turned back to the panel.
The stool scraped against the linoleum. Not much—an inch, maybe two. But the sound rewired the room. Elara's hand moved toward the scalpel before her brain caught up, the instinct of five hundred restorations overriding the sudden awareness that Julian Croft was no longer sitting by the window.
His footsteps were quiet. He'd learned that somewhere, or been born with it—the ability to cross a room without announcing himself. She tracked him anyway: the shift in air pressure, the way the fluorescent lights dimmed just slightly as his silhouette fell across the gilded frame.
Her fingers stopped an inch above the handle.
She could feel him behind her. Not close enough to touch—he was still on the other side of the table, she told herself—but close enough that the space between her shoulder blades tightened. Close enough that she could smell the wool of his jacket, the faint sandalwood underneath. Close enough that her pulse had found its way into her throat.
Her hand hovered over the scalpel. If she picked it up now, he'd see the tremor. The small, traitorous shake that her fingers developed whenever she was—
Whenever.
His stillness anchored the room. That was the only word for it. He'd stopped moving, stopped speaking, stopped doing anything except standing there with his shadow pooled across the wood like dark water. She could feel him breathing. Or maybe she was imagining it. Maybe the sound was her own breath, gone shallow and strange in the silence.
Her fingers closed around the handle.
The tremor was there. Of course it was. She felt it travel up through the steel, a vibration so fine it might as well have been a scream. She didn't look at him. Didn't check to see if he'd noticed. Instead she lowered the blade to the seam—the same seam she'd been working before he stood up, before the room shifted, before everything—and pressed.
The blade met the wood with a sound that filled the space between them. A whisper and a scrape, resin parting from resin, five centuries of stillness giving way to steel.
Behind her, Julian Croft exhaled. She hadn't realized he'd been holding his breath.
The scalpel had to be set down first.
She didn't rush it. Couldn't. The blade met the cloth beside the panel with a small, deliberate click—steel on linen, a sound that belonged to her and no one else. Her fingers uncurled. The tremor was still there, a fine vibration running from knuckle to wrist, but the scalpel was down and her hands were her own again.
Then she turned.
The stool was empty. Julian Croft stood three feet behind her, close enough that his shadow still fell across the table, close enough that she had to tilt her chin to meet his eyes. He hadn't moved since she'd heard him exhale. Hadn't stepped back, hadn't looked away. His hands hung at his sides, the gold cufflinks catching the lamp's glow like small, patient flames.
His gray eyes were waiting for her.
She didn't speak. The words that rose—yes? or what? or why are you standing so close—died somewhere between her ribs. Instead, she held his gaze the way she'd hold a brush mid-stroke: suspended, committed, aware that the next movement would change everything.
The silence stretched. One heartbeat. Two. The fluorescent lights hummed overhead. Somewhere in the building, a door opened and closed, but in the lab there was only the space between their bodies and the weight of his stillness meeting hers.
His gaze didn't wander. Didn't drop to her mouth or flicker toward the panel. He looked at her the way he'd looked at the gilded halo—like something rare, something that required patience, something he'd already decided was worth the wait.
Her fingers found her collarbone without permission. The ridge of bone beneath the worn wool of her cardigan. She forced her hand back to her side, but not before his eyes tracked the movement. Not before something shifted in his face—a softening, maybe, or a register of something she couldn't name.
Still, neither of them spoke.
She could feel the question forming in the air between them, shapeless and enormous. Not what do you want—that was too small. Not why are you here—she already knew the answer to that. It was something else, something she'd been avoiding since the moment he'd walked into her lab. The question lived in the space behind her sternum, and if she opened her mouth, it would fall out.
She kept her mouth shut.
His stillness held. Ten seconds. Twenty. A full minute, maybe, though time had gone strange and syrupy in the lamplight. And through all of it, Julian Croft didn't blink, didn't retreat, didn't give her anything except the steady weight of his attention and the quiet, impossible certainty that he would stand there forever if she let him.