Avoiding Minka’s gaze, I turned to Layla and tried to smile. “I’ll have to take a rain check on that tour. Right now, I need to set up my classroom. See you all later.”

I walked with purpose across the gallery and down the south hall to my classroom. I hoped I’d be able to avoid Minka for the next three weeks but she was like a noxious cloud. Really. If I got within a few hundred feet of her, I tended to suffer flulike symptoms. I supposed I’d be forced to hide out in my classroom from now on, like a sniveling coward.

I stopped at the glass display case outside my room and found the posted schedule of classes for the month. Sure enough, Karalee Pines’s name was crossed out and Minka’s name was written in. She would be teaching a three-hour limp-binding class two nights a week for the next month. My own comprehensive bookbinding class was four nights a week for three weeks. The possibility of seeing her six times in the next month made my head hurt.

Safe in my classroom, I unpacked my tools, then placed the stacks of decorative cloth I’d brought on the side table. I’d found some beautiful printed paper at the Edinburgh Book Fair, from a vendor who specialized in handmade Japanese prints. These would be used by my students for book covers and endpapers.

Looking around, I took a quick inventory of the book presses and punching jigs. The jigs were clever, handmade contraptions made with two pieces of wood screwed together to form a V-shaped cradle. A thin space at the apex of the vee allowed for the pointed end of a sharp punching awl to make sewing holes in folded signatures.