She greets me at the door with a smile. I place plastic booties on my shoes. She directs me past the large screen TV silently displaying pictures of war-torn Syria. Inside the bathroom, she explains that her marble floor has spots in a strange circular pattern.
"I think it was the cleaning lady," she says.
The marble floor is calcium carbonate. "The easiest way to think of it," I explain, "is that you are walking on bones, a bed of long-dead sea creatures crushed and compressed by time, mined and polished. The acid from her cleaning solution ate away the shine."
"Can you fix it?" she asks. "It's driving me crazy."
I nod, write up a bid. Long before this, I worked in the optical industry, explaining lenses and dispersion and the bending of light.