Rain needles the roof in tight, angry stitches. I sit in Jonah’s passenger seat while the harbor lies ahead, a smudged parenthesis of lights bending around the shoal everyone pretends is scenic. Widow’s Teeth flicker pale beyond the pier, their warning lamp breathing in the fog. The car smells like wet wool, coffee gone cold, and the mint he thinks hides coffee. It does not.
“Levels,” he says, tapping his recorder. A red dot steadies. “You ready?”
“For a machine to know I’m shaking?” I press my palm to my knee. “Record the tremor. It might matter later.”
“Then I’ll record this for you,” he says, voice rounding off its usual edge. “Not for them.”
“Define them.”
“Subscribers. Sponsors. Strangers who think pain is a public utility.” He lifts the mic, then lowers it again, looking at me. “Permission is oxygen tonight. You get to ration it.”
I look through the salt-salted glass at the yacht club’s bulk, its windows lit for a silent auction I can picture from memory: antique sextants lined up beside venture-capital mentorships, weathered brass winking at new money like cousins. Lemon oil and printer toner will be battling in there. Old-line families will have already hired fishermen off-season to guard their empty estates so the optics stay clean while they bid. I taste the toner on my tongue and remember how it bloomed across the microfilm prints like tidewater.
“Okay,” I say. “Start.”
He raises the mic again and hits record. “Diary for Mara Ellison,” he says into the rain. “Embargoed. Do not publish without explicit consent. Date, time, Graypoint harbor. Context: she has the locket. She has the microfilm. She has a mother who confuses mercy with management. I have a lead I won’t use unless she says yes.”
The words rearrange my breath. The recorder’s tiny red eye watches us like a tolerant saint.
“You’re really doing this,” I say.
“I’m really doing this,” he echoes, then looks at me, not the road, not the mic. “I don’t need another episode; I need you not to drown.”
I release a laugh that feels like it cut itself on something inside. “I’m not water today. I’m paper. Paper burns.”
“Then we keep the match away.” He captures silence for a beat—as if he’s giving me space in the audio for future me to breathe—and then sets the recorder in the cup holder. “Now the part I need you to hear. I got a voicemail from a woman who listens because her grandson works docks. She says she thinks she knew a kid who matches what you’re reading. You want it?”
The rain grows heavier, a thick gray comb dragged over the windshield. Wipers score arcs that hold clarity for a second and let it go.
“Play it,” I say, and hook my fingers under the seat to keep my hands out of the recording’s way.
He puts the phone on speaker and taps the triangle. A woman’s voice sighs up through static—older, salty, practiced at keeping secrets inside grocery lists.
“Jonah,” she says. “You don’t know me, but you told us once to call if guilt kept us up. I did some cleaning for a family in Seal Point after the big storm three years back. They mentioned a foster they had for a bit, a girl—Tamsin—quiet like a gull on a piling. They said the foundation found funds quick when she needed a new place. We sent casseroles nobody ate. I didn’t think much of it. Then last week I saw your notice about nurse initials and bracelets, and I remembered the girl had a scar on her thumb, like sugar burn. I remember the name because I liked it. Tamsin. She left fast. The mother said ‘donor families help donor families.’ That’s all. Forgive me if that hurts anyone. I just can’t keep it on my pillow anymore.”
The message ends with a clunk, the learned etiquette of someone hanging up before courage evaporates. Rain fills the car’s pause.
“Sugar burn,” I say, and press my boot heel into the floor mat to feel the locket nudge my ankle bone. “Lark wrote ‘sweet tooth’ in one of the margins. A sugar-burn thumb would remember that word on skin.”
“I circled back,” he says. “No caller ID. The number’s rotating. But Seal Point with donor connections narrows things. Two families fit. Both write checks with elegant pens. Both have refrigerators full of catered fruit.”
“Which one knew Vivienne by her first name,” I ask, “and which knew her by her title?”
He half-smiles. “You’re moving faster than my background checks.”
“I’m moving faster than Vivienne’s surveillance.” I lower my voice even though the car is our small church. “There’s a camera in Lark’s portrait. A pinhole tucked into a carved rosette. It hums. It watches the bell. It watched me.”
His eyebrows climb a fraction and then settle. “Then we talk in rain from now on.”
“We talk where water obscures.” I wipe a circle in the fog on my window and see the harbor step one light closer. “Jonah, if Tamsin is T, and she wears Lark’s legal name somewhere in a forgotten file, what I do next could make her a target.”
“Or make her real,” he says softly. The recorder pools his words into the cup holder.
“Being real is dangerous in this town,” I say. “Donors want stories more than people.”
“I know,” he says, and closes his eyes for a moment that’s longer than a blink. His lashes hold tiny rain grains from when he ran to the car. “That’s why this is off the record. I want a person more than a scoop.”
I let that sit in my chest where the locket presses lower heat. “You’d kill an episode for me.”
“I’d kill fifty,” he says. “I already have a job reclaiming my father’s boat, and it pays nothing.”
I laugh. “Your father’s boat is at the bottom of Widow’s Teeth.”
“So, negative salary,” he says, and the joke breaks the atmosphere just enough to let oxygen in. The rain answers with a fresh percussion roll on the roof. Somewhere out on the water a buoy bell mutters, not ours, but a cousin to the bell at Sea Ledger that can’t tell donation from death.
“If we go public now,” I say, “Vivienne will charter her own weather. She’ll argue that the living deserves privacy and that I am stabbing the town’s benevolence with a paperclip. People will applaud her for being maternal and purse-competent.”
“Then we don’t go public now.” He reaches into the backseat and brings forward a wool blanket, tucks it around my knees the way you tuck around a cocoon you want to hatch right. “We build a clean chain-of-custody and we don’t say Tamsin’s name into any room that can’t hold it.”
“You’re quoting me back to me,” I say, and I want to be annoyed but it lands like kindness.
“You trained me,” he says. “You taught me the difference between a story and a sworn statement.”
The rain shifts, heavier, then light, like a curtain someone keeps pulling. A wind gust rocks the car. The harbor smell thickens—kelp bruised by tide, diesel, the cold mineral nose of stone.
“Tell me about Tamsin,” I say. “What do we have?”
He picks up the recorder again but doesn’t angle it toward me; he angles it toward himself. “Note to future Jonah,” he says, and now I hear he’s addressing me through the device with an intimacy that startles me. “Lead: Tamsin Fiske—probable alias or guardians’ surname—fostered in Seal Point, two placements. Both families connected to Sea Ledger donors. Timeline overlaps with bereavement grant cycle. Distinguishing mark: scar on right thumb pad, likely sugar burn. Next steps: do nothing without Mara’s consent. Protect the minor. Embargo all revelations until safety plan exists.”
He clicks pause and sets the recorder down, face toward the ceiling like it’s watching the car’s water constellation. “You still control the switch,” he says.
“I want to follow the lead,” I admit. The admission stains my tongue with fear and mint. “I also want to lock every door and make tea for a girl I’ve never met until her shoulders unclench.”
“We can do both,” he says. “Follow quietly, make tea loudly.”
“Her name in a voicemail,” I say, “is one degree from a post. One degree from a rumor. One degree from Vivienne sending casseroles and conditions.”
He nods and drums two fingers on the steering wheel. “We can start with people who don’t have casseroles—school clerks, a coach, a neighbor with a dog who barks at three a.m. But only if you say go.”
I tip my head back and close my eyes. The car heater hums low, breathing at my ankles. The locket warms careful, a little animal against bone. The paper inside, that single line—T. wears my name—presses deeper into what I believe about mercy.
“Jonah,” I say, “if we find her and she doesn’t want a story, we walk away.”
“Yes,” he says, no hesitation.
“If we find her and she wants recognition, we make sure it’s recognition without extraction.”
“Yes.”
“If we find her and she wants her name back but not the portrait or the bell or the boardroom—”
“We give her the name and keep the rest out of the shot,” he says. The corners of his mouth lift, not in triumph but in agreement. “This can be justice without spectacle.”
“Mercy speaks the same language,” I say. “Different sentences.”
“We don’t have to choose a translation now.” He holds up his smallest finger, grinning like the teenager he never got to be. “Swear it?”
I bark a quiet laugh. “Pinky-swear is admissible in the court of childhood.”
“Best court I know.” He waits.
I hook my finger around his. The gesture is clumsy with rain and wool and everything that’s passed between us over the years. My knuckle bumps the recorder’s edge and it clicks back on with a soft beep, catching the tail of our oath.
“Off the record,” I say into the tiny mic, “until I say otherwise.”
“Off the record,” he echoes.
We hold like that for a beat too long and then release. The sudden absence of contact reveals how warm it had been. I reach for my tote and pull out a Ziploc with one of the microfilm prints, the toner a gray bruise across paper. The asterisk winks beside the “deceased” line that isn’t.
“This,” I say, tapping the margin, “corroborates the bracelet. The locket corroborates the diaries. The voicemail corroborates a body moving in the stream of donor money. Every piece points.”
“But the pointing finger doesn’t have to tweet,” he says.
“Not yet.” I fold the print back into the bag. The plastic squeaks, a small, silly sound that feels human, not forensic. “I need a night to check something at the firm. Nora might have a back path into foster placement dockets—nothing official, but sometimes the staplers talk.”
“Does Vivienne watch the staplers?” he asks.
“Vivienne cultivates them,” I say. “Different surveillance, same harvest.”
The wipers sweep. Rain blurs the yacht club until it looks like a painting of wealth; even riches get soft in bad weather. The harbor’s curve glows clean and dangerous at the same time, a scar that never forgets where it was cut. The shoal waits to rearrange any boat that forgets its lesson.
“One more line,” Jonah says, picking up the recorder again. He does not look at me; he looks out at Widow’s Teeth. “For the diary. I, Jonah Rook, accept that I will publish nothing that harms a minor or endangers Mara’s case or turns a victim into content. I will sit on dynamite if that’s the safer thing to do, even if it makes me poor and boring.”
“You’ll never be boring,” I say, and that truth is softer than I intend.
He clicks stop. The red dot winks out, leaving the damp, ordinary car. The effect is sudden, like lights coming up too fast after a movie.
“What now?” he asks.
“Now I drive to the Salt Finch,” I say. “I catalog the locket with the diaries and scan the note somewhere no one expects. Then I sleep three hours and wake up before Nora does so I can borrow the keys she never admits she has.”
“You won’t sleep,” he says. “You’ll count bells.”
“I’ll count entries,” I say. “And I’ll hear a bell that can’t tell which tone it’s ringing.”
He starts the engine. The defroster sighs across the glass, clearing a crescent of the harbor like an invitation I can’t accept yet. He pulls out slowly, tires whispering over the slick.
“Mara,” he says, eyes on the road, voice turned down to where only I can hear, “if Vivienne has ears in the frames, she has them everywhere. We move like fishermen off-season: we guard the empty places and we do it without writing our names on the gate.”
“Then put your phone in a drawer tonight,” I say. “I’ll text a time. No clocks she can subpoena.”
“Copy that.”
We roll past the yacht club and its auction glow. A kid in a wet hoodie pedals by, plastic bag over his handlebars, a dog trotting behind. For a second I imagine a girl with a sugar-burn thumb biting a paper cup of shaved ice, summer instead of rain, and choosing a flavor that hurts a little because sweetness is louder when it stings.
The thought squeezes my chest. “Jonah,” I say, my voice a word shy of breaking, “what if she’s fine and I ruin fine with truth?”
“Then we leave fine alone,” he says. “And we fix the parts that don’t touch her.”
I nod and wrap the blanket tighter over my knees. The locket nudges my ankle again, a small metal heartbeat. The recorder in the cup holder holds our promise like a sealed jar.
When he drops me at the motel awning, the rain has eased to a steady thread. I open the door and the air hits my face with that Graypoint blend—kelp, wet rope, diesel, the ghost of printer toner from the microfilm print in my bag. I lean in before I close the door and touch the recorder with one finger.
“Keep it,” I say. “Guard it. But don’t listen again unless I’m there.”
“Pinky-swear,” he says.
I step out and watch his taillights smear red across the wet as he turns toward the road that curls back around the harbor. I stand there with the locket warming my bone and the diaries weighing my shoulder and the question heavy as rain:
Do I follow Tamsin tomorrow and risk Vivienne’s shadow finding her first—or do I hide the truth one more night so she can sleep?