The Harbor Glen library crouches at the end of Main Street like an old cat refusing to move for the weather. Snow piles up against its stone steps, gray around the edges from plow spray, and the flag out front hangs limp in the cold. A banner over the door thanks the Mercer Foundation for “technology upgrades,” the abstract wave crest curling at each corner like a signature.
I pull the door open and step into a hush that feels heavier than the one at the estate. The air smells of paper, dust, and faint lemon cleaner, with a sharp thread of winter air leaking in each time the door opens. My boots squeak on the rubber mat. Somewhere deep in the stacks, a cart squeals, then stops.
A circulation desk sits straight ahead, guarded by a woman with short iron-gray hair and a cardigan dotted with embroidered snowflakes. She looks up over half-moon glasses.
“Good morning,” she says, voice pitched low for the building. “Careful, floor’s wet.”
“Thanks,” I say, automatically lowering my own volume. “Do you, um, have public computers I can use?”
She nods toward a row of terminals along the far wall. Each sits on a pale wood desk with a plastic chair and a little laminated sign: FORTY-FIVE MINUTE LIMIT DURING PEAK TIMES.
“We do,” she says. “You’ll need to sign in. Local card or guest pass?”
“Guest,” I say.
“Visiting for the holidays?” she asks, fingers already tapping at the keyboard.
“Something like that,” I answer.
Her eyes flick to my gloves resting on the desk, to the small Mercer crest stamped near the wrist. I slide them into my pocket, skin prickling.
“Name?” she asks.
“Hannah Cole,” I say, and then add, “Mercer,” because it feels dishonest not to. The syllables scratch my throat on the way out.
“All right, Ms. Cole-Mercer,” she says, pronouncing it carefully, making it formal. “You’re logged in as Guest 3. That station there.”
She points to a computer near the middle of the row. I thank her and walk over, every step too loud in my own ears. A man in a navy peacoat sits two terminals down, scrolling with slow, deliberate movements. His reflection wavers in the dark windowglass behind the monitors.
The chair creaks when I sit. The plastic feels cold through my jeans. The monitor blinks to life with a faded desktop background of the harbor during the Light the Harbor parade—boats strung with twinkling lights, fireworks frozen in mid-bloom over the water. At the bottom of the screen, a little text box credits the image to the Mercer Foundation’s annual photography contest.
Of course.
I move the mouse. The cursor lags for a second then catches up, like it’s waking from its own snowstorm. On the desktop, shortcuts crowd in: LIBRARY CATALOG, STATE DATABASE PORTAL, MUNICIPAL RECORDS ACCESS. The last one tugs at me.
I click it. A browser opens, then another pop-up, demanding a login. Someone has taped a pink sticky note to the monitor frame with “Public Login – see Librarian” and a smiley face. I glance back at the desk; the woman there is scanning a stack of paperbacks, movements neat and automatic.
“Excuse me,” I say, walking back over. “The municipal records thing needs a password?”
“Oh, right, the portal.” She swivels a binder toward herself, flips a few pages, then recites a username and password from a printed list. “Changes every quarter. Please don’t download anything too big. It chokes the Wi-Fi.”
“I won’t,” I say.
Back at the computer, I type in the credentials, fighting the stiff, sticky keyboard. The login spins, then dumps me onto a web page that looks fifteen years out of date—gray boxes, tiny fonts, a logo for the county government and another, smaller one for Harbor Glen PD. Tabs across the top read INCIDENT REPORTS, ACCIDENT LOGS, ARCHIVED RECORDS.
The cursor hovers over INCIDENT REPORTS. I click.
Search fields bloom on the screen: DATE RANGE, INCIDENT TYPE, LOCATION, KEYWORD. I rub my palms against my thighs, pick a starting point, and type.
Date range: the winter of Lydia’s accident, from what Daniel told me and what Evelyn performed by the memorial tree. Incident type: “Boating / Marine.” Location: Harbor Glen. My fingers freeze over the keyword box. I don’t want to type Lydia’s name into a police database for anyone to find later.
I leave the keyword field blank and hit SEARCH.
A spinning circle appears, jittering in place. I glance to my left. The man in the peacoat keeps scrolling, face impassive, but his screen’s reflection glows faintly in the glass. On my right, a teenager in a puffy jacket blasts a video through earbuds, the tinny beat just audible, her shoulders bouncing slightly.
Still, I feel watched, the hairs at the nape of my neck standing up. The Mercer crest on the donor plaque in the corner seems to stare.
The search populates a list. Dozens of entries appear, each line crammed with codes and abbreviations: MAR-INC, HG BAY, dates and case numbers. I scroll, heart thudding.
There. A date that matches the story I’ve been handed, time stamped mid-afternoon: “Marine Incident – HG Bay / Cliffside – Minors Involved.” The incident number clings to it like a tag.
I click the link.
At first, all I get is a few lines of text formatted for a printer in 2002: basic fields, all caps. REPORTING OFFICER. LOCATION. WEATHER. Then, under SUMMARY, the words I’ve heard in softer form so many times: “Report of small craft overturned near cliffs. Adult male and female located on shore. One minor female deceased on scene. Search initiated for missing minor(s).”
My breath catches on the parentheses.
Minor(s).
I scroll further. Below, under ADDITIONAL NOTES, a line reads: “At time of initial response, two minors unaccounted for per witness statements.”
Two.
My pulse skips. I press my fingers harder into the cheap mouse, grounding myself in its tacky plastic.
I scroll again, hunting for clarifications—names, ages, anything—but the early log cuts off there, rolling into boilerplate about jurisdiction and transfer to investigative units.
My mind scrambles. Evelyn’s version never featured two missing children. Daniel’s grief has always orbited Lydia alone, a single sun. Yet here, in the unemotional language of a police template, somebody typed two minors unaccounted for.
I fumble for the PRINT button, but there isn’t one. Just a line of blue text: VIEW SCANNED ORIGINAL / VIEW FINAL NARRATIVE. I click VIEW SCANNED ORIGINAL.
A PDF viewer opens, grey and sluggish. The loading bar crawls across the bottom while a little message warns me not to close the window. I taste metal at the back of my tongue.
When the document finally appears, it’s a scanned image of a paper report, the kind with boxes and blank lines. The officer’s handwriting loops across the top row; the ink looks thick and dark, almost glossy in the scanned light. I zoom in, thumb rolling the mouse wheel until the letters blot the screen.
In the summary section, I find it: “Upon arrival, adult M and F located, one minor F located deceased on shore, two minors unaccounted for.”
The words are there, but they’re not clean. A heavy line of ink slashes through “two minors unaccounted for” so hard the pen must have pressed into the paper. Someone has scribbled over it repeatedly, turning the phrase into a jagged black band. On top of the scribble, different handwriting, tighter and more careful, has written: “one minor unaccounted for – see amended narrative.”
My stomach lurches. I swallow hard and taste coffee and ginger cookie from the café, now sour.
I lean closer, until my forehead nearly bumps the monitor. At 200% zoom, the scribbled line resolves into overlapping strokes. At 400%, the edges blur, but here and there, the faint ghosts of letters peek through the black: part of a “t,” the curve of an “o,” the cross of an “f”.
“No,” I whisper under my breath. “No, no, no.”
I drag the zoom window down to the bottom of the page. In the margin, near the scribble, a note reads: “Per Supervising Officer, see corrected entry – 19:42.” The initials next to it are just two direct lines, impossible to read. I check the header; the scan date is from years after the incident, the year the Mercer Foundation underwrote the “digitization of town records,” according to the plaque I passed in the foyer.
Love and harm share the same hands, I think. Hospitals and foundations and scholarship funds on one palm, and a pen erasing a missing child on the other.
My fingers have gone numb on the mouse. I flex them, then grab the PRINT icon in the viewer and click. The computer grinds for a second, then a small dialogue box appears, asking me to confirm: PRINT TO PUBLIC – 10 CENTS PER PAGE.
I don’t hesitate. Ten cents is nothing compared to what this cost the kid whose existence got turned into a scribble.
“Please work,” I whisper.
Behind me, the printer sputters to life, rattling in its corner like it hasn’t been asked for miracles in a while. I stand and cross to it, the noise drawing a quick glance from the man in the peacoat. He looks from my face to the machine, then back to his screen.
The first sheet slides out, warm and slightly curled at the edges. The ink’s shiny in places where the scanned black is darkest. I snatch it before it can fall onto the output tray’s lip.
Up close, the scribbled line looks even more violent. The pen strokes have depth that the scanner captured—a ridge where someone pressed too hard, a slight shadow at the edges. The faint outline of “two minors unaccounted for” breathes under the blackout.
I feed my card into the little coin slot box, tapping in the code the librarian gave me. On the computer, I click PRINT again, this time choosing the “final narrative” link. If anyone ever questions me, I need both versions.
The second page thumps into the tray. I grab it and flip it over. In the final narrative, the language is smoother, clearly typed later by someone with editing software and legal consultation: “Marine incident involving Mercer family vessel. One minor, Lydia Mercer, deceased at scene. One minor reported missing at time of incident, later determined not present.”
My skin goes cold.
“Later determined not present,” I say under my breath. “What does that even mean?”
I picture a room somewhere—with lawyers, maybe hospital administrators, maybe Evelyn in some tasteful suit—deciding that a second child at the scene was too messy to keep. That it would be better if the records reflected only one daughter, the one the town already knew.
The trust document flashes in my mind, the phrases branded there: “Second Daughter Beneficiary.” “Non-disclosure.” “No contact.” “Irregular medical documentation.”
The scribbled-out “two minors” pulses beneath the printed sentence like a heartbeat inside a bruise.
I slip both pages together and fold them carefully, tucking them into the inner pocket of my coat, close to where I keep my phone. Then I pull the phone out and, shielding the papers with my body, take quick photos of each page. The shutter sound is too loud in the quiet; I fumble to mute it.
When I look up, the librarian is standing halfway down the row of computers, reshelving a pile of returned books. Her gaze lands on the printer, the glowing terminal, me.
“Everything working okay?” she asks.
My throat tightens. For a second, I imagine her walking over, plucking the pages from my pocket, apologizing for the mistake and assuring me that the Mercers’ lawyers will sort it out.
“Yes,” I say, too bright. “Sorry for the noise.”
She smiles, setting a book on the shelf. “That old printer sounds worse than it is,” she says. “You looking at the police archives?”
My heart claws at my ribs. “Just, um, researching an incident,” I say. “Old boating accident.”
“We get people chasing history down those rabbit holes all the time,” she says. “Genealogy, property disputes, true crime buffs. Those old files glitch sometimes, you know. Lines show up that were corrected later, notes that shouldn’t have carried over into the scans.”
The word glitch hits me like a slap. I think of Claire’s niece getting “transferred,” of the heavy ink on the page pressed hard enough to dent the paper.
“Glitch,” I repeat.
“Software isn’t perfect,” she says with a shrug. “When the Mercer Foundation paid to digitize everything, we warned them that the old handwriting would be tricky. The official line is, if you see any discrepancies, you should trust the most recent document.”
Of course that’s the line.
“What if the discrepancy is the only part that feels honest?” I ask before I can stop myself.
Her brows crease. She glances toward the front of the library, where the donor wall gleams in brushed metal, the Mercer crest catching the light.
“I’m just the librarian,” she says quietly. “My job is to keep the books on the shelves and the computers running. I don’t certify truths.”
“But you know those records used to be paper,” I press. “Before they became files someone could…edit.”
“Everything used to be paper,” she says. “Made it easier to lose things, in its own way.”
She hesitates, then lowers her voice a fraction.
“If you’re looking at something sensitive,” she says, “might not be a bad idea to email it to yourself or…whatever people do now. In case the system decides to clean itself up.”
My breath stutters. “Is that…policy?” I ask.
“That’s not anything,” she says quickly. “I didn’t say that. I said the computers are old and the software glitches. That’s all.”
Our eyes meet. For a moment, we stand suspended between the official story and whatever sits under it, like ink beneath a scribble.
“Forty-five-minute limit,” she adds, normal volume again, nodding toward the laminated sign. “But you’re fine. We’re not exactly flooded with patrons today.”
“Right,” I say. “Thank you.”
When she moves away, I sit back down and, with shaking hands, pull the report up again. The little email icon in the viewer blinks in the corner. I click it.
A basic form opens, asking for an address. I type my personal Gmail, the one Evelyn doesn’t have and Daniel rarely uses. In the subject line, I don’t write “Lydia’s accident” or “two minors.” I write “Holiday recipes,” then attach both the initial log and the final narrative.
I hit SEND. A tiny confirmation message appears, then vanishes.
Behind me, the man in the peacoat stands, zipping his jacket. He glances once at my screen, then away, like he’s deliberately not reading it. He smells faintly of woodsmoke and outside air as he passes.
When the computer warns me my session will time out in two minutes, I log out instead, clearing the browser history until the home screen reflects nothing but the harbor fireworks again. On my way to the door, I detour toward the donor wall.
The plaque for the Mercer Foundation is the largest, centered at eye level. Their crest curls there, an abstract wave carved deep into the metal, as if it could reshape the surface underneath with a single motion. Beneath the crest, etched letters thank the family for “ensuring transparency and access to civic records for all Harbor Glen residents.”
I stop, fingers curling into fists inside my pockets, the folded report edges digging into my palm. Transparency that hides a missing child. Access that erases the inconvenient parts.
Love and harm, same hands.
I turn away before the librarian can see my face and push the door open. Cold air slams into me, full of salt and the distant sterile tang from the hospital on the hill. The snow has stopped, but the clouds hang low, bruised over the water.
Somewhere between these cliffs and the docks, a little girl went missing and was declared “later determined not present” by people who could afford to make that true on paper.
I step down onto the icy sidewalk, coat pulled tight around the evidence pressed to my ribs, and walk toward the back road that will haul me up to the estate, every crunch of snow under my boots counting down to the moment I ask Evelyn Mercer who her second daughter really was—and what she did to make her disappear from the record.