I tuck the florist sleeve under my arm like a penitent and knock twice on Lydia Brighton’s door. The lake breathes behind me—long inhale, short slap against the rocks, that seiche rhythm that turns gossip into travel. Ruth stands a half step back, hat in her hands, cop posture turned neighborly.
The door opens a polite width. A woman with iron-gray hair and rose-polish chips at her nails looks me over. “Mara Keane,” she says, not asking.
“Yes, ma’am.” I lift the bouquet like an apology. “Shelf carnations and a stubborn hydrangea. I wanted to come with boundaries and flowers, in that order.”
Lydia’s mouth thinks about a smile and then declines. “Boundaries first,” she says, and she lets us in.
The house smells like lemon oil and something baked in a pan long ago—brown sugar caught in cast iron, revived by heat every time the oven turns on. A small brass bell sits on a bookshelf beside framed school photos; it’s decorative, not a survivor of the tower, but my throat tightens regardless. I place the flowers on the counter and pull a folded card from my pocket. “I wrote out what I won’t do,” I say, and hand it to her. “No surprises. No tape without consent and off when you say off. If you hate this, I leave.”
Ruth adds, “And I’ll hold her to it.”
Lydia reads the card. Her index finger taps once under a line I wrote last: I am not entitled to Celia. She looks up. “Are you recording me right now?”
I hold my recorder like a sleeping animal. “Not yet,” I say. “I’d like permission to roll room tone and my name, your name, date and place. No questions until we talk about questions.”
“Room tone?” she asks.
“The sound of where we are,” I say. “Every room has a breath. It helps me not lie in the edit.”
Lydia weighs me in the quiet and then nods to the coffee table. “Sit. One minute. Then we decide.”
We sit on a sofa that sighs like it knows grief by weight. I place the recorder on my palm, hit standby but not record, and look at her hands. They tell me she works the garden and the Facebook swap group and the kettle, and maybe all three at once. She lowers herself into the chair across from us and smooths her skirt, a gesture that says: I will keep order here.
“Tell me what that envelope bought you at the church,” she says.
Ruth answers. “Ten minutes and stairs,” she says. “We measured air, not souls.”
Lydia exhales through her nose. “They’ll polish their names twice this week if they catch a rumor you were in there.” She points at my recorder. “Okay. Roll. Names and place only.”
I press the button and the little red light brightens like a heartbeat. “Second Lives working tape,” I say quietly. “March twenty-first, Brighton residence, Ashgrove-on-Erie. Present: Lydia Brighton, Ruth Calder, and me, Mara Keane. Recorder on for room tone for sixty seconds.” I set the recorder on the table and sit on my hands.
The room offers its breath: a fridge hum changing key, floorboard tick settling to temperature, lake shoulder pushing a slow rhythm against shore. The brass bell on the shelf does nothing but remind.
After a minute, I ease the recorder off. “Thank you,” I say. “I have a locket.”
Lydia’s eyes switch to amber. “I heard,” she says. “The town hears before you speak. Show it.”
I open the fireproof box like I’m unwrapping an organ. The heart on the microfiber looks meek in good light, its tarnish honest, the “C.B.” neat and not factory neat. Lydia leans forward but doesn’t reach. Her jaw tightens in a way that makes me squeeze my knees together to keep from explaining the whole case like an overeager student.
“This engraving,” she says quietly. “I know that hand.” She turns to Ruth. “Did you bring your milk crates in here?”
“No,” Ruth says. “I brought my ears.”
Lydia stands and disappears down the hall. I count twenty heartbeats by the lake’s rhythm before she comes back with a canvas tote. She lays a photo album and a stapled packet on the table. The album’s vinyl cover creaks when she opens it. “We start with boundaries,” she says. “No faces on the internet. No clips without my yes. You are not a donor or a hero. You are a guest.”
“Yes,” I say, and the yes sits straight-backed in my mouth.
She turns a page. Celia looks out at me from a dock, hair whipped into a banner, smile ferocious and unprepared—for cameras, for boys, for towers. My chest learns a new kind of ache. Lydia taps the corner of the photo where a glint hides on a chain against her daughter’s throat. “She made jewelry,” Lydia says. “Summer Metals Workshop. They let high schoolers in if they signed their fingers away on a form and promised to polish the benches.”
I slide the stapled packet closer and read the cover aloud. “Ashgrove Community Art Co-op—Summer Metals 2008,” I say. Inside, tool sketches march like tiny soldiers: graver, chasing hammer, pitch bowl. A class list lives on the second page; someone’s handwriting—Celia’s?—has drawn little hearts next to “etching jig demo” and “electrolytic bath safety.” My throat tightens again.
Lydia flips to a page of practice plates in plastic sleeves. Each has the same careful line weight, letters nested with pride. C, B, L, and dashes like a code. One plate shows a heart, lopsided but brave, with initials tucked where light would catch. The serif on the C matches my locket’s serif like a signature you’d know even if it shook.
“She could have made it,” I whisper. “It isn’t store-bought.”
“She did,” Lydia says, voice steady but hands unsteady, sliding that practice plate closer to my eyes and not letting me touch it. “She brought me a brass charm the week before the regatta and said maybe she’d sell things at the holiday market. And I told her to start with gifts for girls who didn’t get gifts from boys they didn’t like.”
Ruth’s gaze moves between the plate and the locket. “Same style,” she says. “Same hand pressure.”
Lydia turns another page to a candid from inside the co-op: a line of teens leaning over benches, safety goggles up in their hair. A boy in the back wears a crisp polo with a tiny crane stitched on the chest. My stomach registers the logo before my head completes the surname.
“They weren’t students,” Lydia says. “They were donors’ sons who wandered through. ‘Curious about craft,’ the director said. They touched the tools without permission.” She looks at the doorway like the past might knock. “Crane boys were everywhere that summer.”
The sentence hangs in the room like a low bell note. Ruth doesn’t write it down. She places her palms on her knees, anchoring.
“I need to ask permission to record your voice,” I say, the words slow so they don’t trip. “Not now. Not the cry. Not pain. Just your memory of the class and that she worked in brass, and that this style is hers. You can say stop and I will stop.”
Lydia considers me as if I were a yard-sale shopper pawing through what can’t be priced. “One minute,” she says. “Names and facts. No clever questions. And if I lift a finger, you click that off.”
“Yes.” I set the recorder near the album. “Second Lives—consent obtained for one minute—Lydia Brighton speaking about metals class.” I let the red light work and watch Lydia’s breath shorten, then settle.
“Celia took the 2008 summer metals class,” she says, focusing on the packet so she doesn’t have to focus on me. “She practiced engraving initials. Her lines had a tiny hitch on the upstroke. That hitch is here.” She references the locket with her chin. “She talked about selling at the co-op market. The boys with money visited the studio too often for boys who didn’t care about art.” Her mouth tightens, and she lifts a finger.
I click off, the little sound a respectful period. My hands shake, not from caffeine, from the responsibility that jumps weight in moments like this. I breathe with the fridge hum until my ribcage remembers it owns its own rhythm.
“Do you have a copy of the class roster?” Ruth asks, voice low.
Lydia shakes her head. “Paper went missing when the co-op moved from the mill to the lofts. People forget to carry boxes when donors offer trucks.” She taps the stapled program. “You can take a photocopy of page two. Not the originals.”
I pull my portable scanner from my bag and ask with my eyes. She nods. The scanner ticks like an insect, line by line. Each pass smells faintly of warm plastic and duty. I name the file out loud for the tape that isn’t rolling: “Brighton_MetalsProgram_2008_copy.pdf.”
Lydia closes the album halfway and rests her palm on it like a lid on a simmering pot. “Where did you get the locket?” she asks.
“Harbor Barn,” I say. “Consignment lot marked ‘misc. jewelry.’ The box came in from a church sale, according to a scribble on their intake sheet.” I don’t say the donor wall. I don’t say the rope burn on the landing. I let the room keep those pieces until we need them.
“Church sales know what they’re selling,” Lydia says. “They pretend they don’t.” She pours water from a kettle that squeals in apology, sets three chipped mugs on coasters shaped like fish, and hangs a tea bag tag over the rim of mine. The steam smells like lemon and paper.
Ruth clears her throat. “We were in the tower this morning,” she says. “We clapped, we hummed. The room’s tail matches parts of what Mara heard in the hinge.”
Lydia’s hand stills on the kettle. “I know what that room does,” she says. “It keeps voices for people who never asked to be memorialized by echoes.” She looks at me. “Don’t put anything on the internet that teaches men how to scare girls for sport.”
“I won’t,” I say. The promise sits in my bones and taps at my shins until I sit straighter.
She slides the metals packet back into its sleeve with the care of a nurse returning instruments. “Celia wasn’t a saint,” she says. “She could be sharp. She could be wrong. But she was mine. You say her name like she isn’t content. You say it like a person.”
“I will,” I say. “I am.” I glance at Ruth, who tips a fraction of a nod.
Micro-hook lives in the space after that: Lydia lifts the photo album again and reveals an envelope tucked beneath the back cover. She doesn’t hand it to me. She opens it and pulls out three small test strips of copper, each with a wedge of engraving like half-finished initials. On the edge of one, a tiny serration mirrors the odd bite on my locket’s C. She lays it on the microfiber beside the heart.
“That bite,” she says. “Celia’s graver chipped and she refused to toss it because she liked how honest it was. It nicked into the upstroke and made a little tooth. Look.”
I look. The tooth answers across years. Heat rises under my jacket in a way that isn’t pride, isn’t joy, just a dawning that the object I’ve been holding is not an artifact I found—it’s a thing someone made with a chipped tool and a future she didn’t get.
Ruth exhales softly. “We’ll need to talk to the metals teacher,” she says.
“He’s at the high school,” Lydia replies. “He wrote letters when the co-op lost boxes. He also plays nice at Marina Club fundraisers so his program keeps lights.”
“Crane boys were in that room, too,” I say, testing the linkage without crowding it. “Not as students.”
Lydia closes the album and slides it toward the center of the table, a small reclaiming. “They were at the tower, at the docks, at the studio, at the market, at the council laughing into microphones they paid for,” she says. “They were everywhere. That summer they practiced being future men while people thanked their fathers for sponsoring the regatta.”
The fridge hum clicks to silence, and without it, the lake breathes louder through the screen. The brass bell on the shelf looks harmless. I don’t trust harmless.
“I need your boundaries in writing,” I say gently. “To protect you, and to protect the case from me. You can revoke consent. You can ask for nothing to air until you hear it. You can be anonymous if you choose.”
“No,” she says, surprising me. “You don’t put my face anywhere. But you don’t hide my name. I said Celia’s name for twelve years in rooms where men pretended deafness. If you hide mine now, they get what they bought.”
I breathe once, deep, until dizzy shifts to steady. “Okay,” I say. “Name, on tape, under your control.”
She signs my simple release with a pen that writes like a dry branch on snow. Her hands don’t tremble now. “You’ll walk into the Marina Club sooner or later,” she says. “They’ll offer canapés and context. They’ll talk about safety. They’ll clap when you leave.” She meets my eyes and I feel the scrape of her assessment. “You think you’re ready for polite harm?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “But I know how to bring a recorder that doesn’t blink.”
“Bring Ruth,” she says. “They remember her.”
Ruth manages not to smile. “They wish they didn’t.”
I stand, because sitting feels like staying and staying feels like theft. I pack the locket slowly. “Thank you for trusting me with the practice plate copy,” I say. “And with the bite.”
Lydia walks us to the door. The lake has crawled closer in the time we sat; a small surge slaps the rocks with a sound like a hand over a mouth. She touches the frame, not our shoulders. “One more boundary,” she says. “If this hurts people who aren’t guilty, you stop and you come here and you let me look you in the eye while you explain why.”
“Yes,” I say, and there’s no wiggle room in it.
“Then go ask your teacher,” she says. “And don’t get caught asking the wrong men for permission to do what’s right.”
We step onto the porch. Wind lifts the flower sleeve and rattles it like paper that can’t wait to be important. Across the street, a regatta pennant sags on someone’s porch post, last summer trying to live in this one. My phone buzzes: a Facebook swap thread ping-pinging about “that podcaster girl harassing mourning families.”
I put the phone back in my pocket without granting it a second look. “She recognized the bite,” I say to Ruth, my voice low. “She recognized her daughter’s hand.”
“And she warned us about the hands that held the rope,” Ruth replies.
The lake breathes again. The town clears its throat. I think of the tower’s scalloped tail and the practice plate’s tooth. The line between them gets shorter by the step.
“We find the metals teacher,” I say. “And we keep the promise we just made.”
The screen door clicks behind us, and Lydia’s living room holds its breath, waiting to see which story—saving or exploiting—I tell next.