I go where the fluorescent lights hum like guilty bees. The basement at Berridge & Knox has a temperature that doesn’t forgive hands; I rub mine together until the lemon oil on the banister gives up a ghost of warmth. Boxes stack like verdicts. The old microfilm reader squats in its corner, sulking. Somewhere overhead, the brass bell at Sea Ledger holds both tones in its brass throat—donation and death—waiting for the next hand to decide which sound to release.
Nora is already there, cardigan sleeves shoved to elbows, hair stabbed through with a pencil that has been used to pry open more truths than a judge. She’s wearing the expression I’ve learned to call her “lunch break for the rulebook.”
“You were up late,” she says without looking at me. “Your shoes are arguing with the floor.”
“They’re negotiating jurisdiction,” I answer. My voice fogs a little; the basement air tastes like paper dust and the faint chemical bite of printer toner. My coat is still salted from the harbor road. Graypoint seeps through seams even inland.
She slides a ceramic mug toward me—NORA printed in chipped block letters—and sets her own beside the workstation. “I have to go upstairs for coffee,” she announces to no one. “And I am very forgetful today. My memory is a colander.”
“Terrible condition,” I say.
She tilts the monitor so the glow hits my throat like a small investigation. The county case-management portal blinks a login box. A sticky note clings to the frame, corner lifting like a wink. She sighs theatrically. “I hate when I leave my workstation unlocked. It’s dangerous for compliance and helpful for…justice.”
I watch her. She watches the ceiling where the pipes carry building gossip.
“Nora,” I say.
“Hmm?” she hums, already reaching for her scarf.
“You’re going to forget your password on the sticky.”
“I’m a menace.” She tucks the sticky note under the mug, a magician’s flourish so lazy it reads as defiance. “I’ll be back in…a duration.” She points her pencil at me like a judge’s finger. “What you touch, you document. What you document, you don’t publish without consent.”
“I’m not the one with a podcast,” I say.
“You’re worse,” she replies. “You have a conscience and a filing system.” She heads for the stairs, adding, “The county IT people are night fishermen—watchful when nothing should be moving. Treat logs like tripwires.”
The stairwell door gasps shut. The room exhales old paper. I slide into her chair, pulse steadying into the rhythm of fluorescent hum and the distant, tidal groan of the building settling on its haunches.
I type the username from memory and the password from the sticky that “accidentally” falls into my palm. The screen opens its small city: case numbers, tabs labeled PLACEMENT, CONTACTS, NOTICES. The color palette is old beige and fresh threat.
I start with what I have: Tamsin. I don’t write her last name because I don’t have it safe yet—only a voice mail and a rumor that pinned itself to my ribs. I try TAMSIN ? UNKNOWN; the search engine frowns. I pivot to fuzzy matches, then to placement dates that collate with Beatrice’s bracelet night. I make the screen behave like a ledger.
The system gives me a name that might be a decoy or a blessing: Tamsin Fiske. I say it in my mouth very quietly. It tastes like a syllable that wants to run.
I click the file. Red bars bracket half the fields; a lock icon tells me I am a visitor with shoes on. The parts I’m allowed to see read like a children’s book with half the pages glued shut: dates, caseworker initials, two addresses, both worn thin with movement.
I open a second window and pull up the Ellison Foundation’s public grants archive, the one we wave around when donors ask for transparency at the yacht club—between the antique sextants and the venture-capital “mentorships,” between compliments and knives. We publish more than most. We publish less than matters.
I cross-reference addresses with donor names. The town’s map unfolds in me: which street belongs to which family, who hires fishermen off-season to guard empty estates, which porch lights are act-only props. The air tastes of kelp and money turned into lemon-polished wood. I run my finger down the gift list and feel history rearrange itself beneath a spreadsheet.
Placement One: a tidy saltbox owned by the Caffreys, who donated “bereavement kits” last spring. Our website thanks them in a photograph with Vivienne smiling a careful two teeth. The county file shows a placement there for three months. I click the CONTACTS tab. A note: “Home used for respite, donor affiliated.” My throat closes on the word respite; the page doesn’t know what it means.
Placement Two: a ranch house with vinyl siding on Harbor Road, owned by Fiske—same surname as the child, which makes my neck prickle. Mr. and Mrs. Fiske show up in our gala program under “Harbor Guardians,” the euphemism we invented for donors who preferred cash and anonymity. I scroll. A stipend from “Community Stabilization Fund” landed the same week Tamsin was moved in. I scrawl the fund code on the back of my hand with Nora’s pencil like I’m fourteen and cheating my way into survival.
Micro-hook: On another tab, the access log counter ticks upward by one, a red bead sliding on a wire, and I imagine county IT leaning over their third coffee, asking who woke the dead file at midnight.
I keep going. The caseworker initials recur: J.R., then A.L., then back to J.R. I hover over the tooltip that says “Contact withheld by protective order” and memorize the cadence of those words because I will need to say them to myself like a rule when I want to run and fix something with my bare hands.
“You are not a rescuer,” I whisper. “You are a witness who files.” I picture the brass ship’s bell at the estate, and I force myself to hear both tones at once until the sound hurts enough to behave.
I cross-check school district entries. The file allows me a “Proof of Enrollment” stub, redacted around the bones. A date, a code, a district name: HRSD-04. I click the district map. It blooms into a shape that hooks the coastline—Harbor Ridge catchment, running from the marina up through commercial canyon and into the hills where the wind lives.
I whisper the school’s name into the glow: “Harbor Ridge High.”
The words lift my heart so fast it thuds like a gull hitting glass. I steady the beat with my palm and discriminate between adrenaline and purpose. Adrenaline is loud and stupid. Purpose is quieter and does the dishes.
The printer beside the workstation exhales and blinks its green eye. I feed it a command like a prayer—Attendance Verification: HRSD-04, last quarter—and give it one single page: no more, no less. The machine sucks paper like a tide and starts to thrum. The room fills with that warm, electrical smell that sits between hope and a bad office.
Footsteps shuffle above us—cleaners passing like shoals. I think about the cleaners we pay to keep the edges bright at Sea Ledger, how even our dust is curated. The foundation mails “thank you” cards printed on textured stock that sheds tiny white snow when cut; my father used to blow the confetti off his sleeves and call it good weather.
The page slides out, face up: HARBOR RIDGE HIGH — ATTENDANCE VERIFICATION. The ink glistens like wet stone. Under the header, the name is blacked out, but the student number isn’t. The last four digits match the code in the placement log. The date line shows this semester, not last. Tamsin still walks those halls.
“Okay,” I breathe to the room. “Okay.”
The stairwell door eases; Nora returns with coffee and a mouth that claims innocence. She takes in my posture, the printer’s warm belly, the way I’ve started to grip the edge of the desk like I might lift the building.
“Tell me you printed one page,” she says.
“One page,” I confirm. I hold it up, a small white flag that refuses surrender.
She sips and nods at the monitor. “You flagged the grant intersections?”
“Caffreys’ respite house. The Fiskes under Harbor Guardians. A stabilization stipend that landed the week she moved in.”
“And the school.”
“Harbor Ridge High,” I say, and I hear the syllables catch in my throat like a fishhook.
Nora sets her coffee down and leans her hip against the desk the way people lean against rails to look for whales. “You’re on the edge of the cliff now,” she says. “Next step is wind.”
“Next step is a note in a locker,” I say before I can stop myself, and then my body recognizes what my mouth admitted and tightens everywhere there’s a hinge.
“No names,” she reminds me. “No pressure. No promises you can’t keep. You’re not swearing anyone in under oath, you’re inviting a child to have a choice.”
I nod and pin the page under my palm so the warm ink doesn’t skate. “Vivienne’s network will smell it if I breathe wrong.”
“Then breathe like a janitor,” Nora says. “Invisible, regular, necessary.” She takes back her seat, taps her way to the portal’s log. Her eyes soften. “We should close your footprints.”
“County IT are fishermen?” I say, echoing her earlier warning.
“Old-line families hire fishermen off-season to guard empty estates,” she says, “and the county hires them to watch the nets of data. Different docks, same eyes.” She executes three short, elegant keystrokes that feel like mercy. “There. You came in as a rumor and left as dust.”
I fold the page and slip it into the inner lining of my coat, where the locket has left a small memory of warmth. “Nora,” I say, and my voice is raw with the thing I promised Jonah last night: protection first, story second.
“I know,” she says. “You think there’s a clock with your family’s name on it.” She gestures at the ladders of boxes that hold other families’ clocks. “There is. Don’t wind yours by hurting hers.”
“How do I not?” I ask.
She lifts her pencil and balances it on one finger like a scale. “You count hands. Who holds the weight? Who should? And you don’t confuse love with being needed.”
Micro-hook: The lights stutter once, a basement blink I’ve learned to treat as a sign. Somewhere, a server sneezes. Somewhere, a donor checks a balance. I pocket the sign anyway.
We close the portal. Nora pulls up the public grants archive and leaves it full screen, like a decoy sleeping animal. She pushes her mug toward me and pretends to search for a pen she’s already tucked behind her ear.
“I have to misplace myself in the stairwell for three minutes,” she says. “If you happen to remember anything while I’m gone, write it down and then forget where you put the note.”
“You train excellent criminals,” I say.
“Archivists,” she corrects. “Criminals misfile.” She pauses at the door. “Mara—”
I look up.
“The bell isn’t a god,” she says. “It doesn’t get to tell you what tone your choice makes.”
The door closes behind her. The basement breathes out the taste of spool and dust. I take a fresh scrap from the legal pad and write three lines in my smallest handwriting:
- Harbor Ridge High
- Locker 312? (Find pattern in diary acrostics)
- Message: sugar-burn, “sweet tooth,” safe words only
I tuck the scrap behind the faceplate of the old microfilm reader, where the light goes to die. My hands shake with the aftershock of almost being useful and the terror of being seen. If Vivienne has the boathouse, the portraits, the fishermen, what will she set at a school? A counselor who reports to a donor? A friendly attendance clerk who recognizes my name on a visitor log? The town smells like printer toner when it wants to be clean; I smell it now, an invisible dust coating the back of my tongue.
I climb the stairs with the printout pinched flat in my coat and the locket pressing a small circle against my ankle bone. At the top, the office windows show a slice of harbor, the crescent scar shining under a pallid sky. Widow’s Teeth breaks the surface in a hush of pale ridges. Somewhere beyond, old-line families pay fishermen to keep watch on houses that hold only their reputations. I think of the boathouse and the phrase I stole: Unclaimed is invisible.
“Not to me,” I say to the glass.
On my desk upstairs, the firm’s phones glow with messages, donors and board members and Ethan’s name like an ache; I silence the screen. The bell inside me wants to ring both tones at once. I pocket my keys instead.
Nora appears beside my doorway with a folder she pretends I requested and a look that says she knows I didn’t. “You’re going to walk into a public building tomorrow,” she says lightly, “and behave like air.”
“I’m going to walk into a public building tomorrow,” I repeat, my voice finding an even line. “And give a kid a choice.”
She nods. “Write your note tonight. Put it under your tongue. If you still believe in it by morning, spit it onto paper.”
“And if a fisherman in a blazer is standing at the attendance desk?”
“Ask for a tour,” she says. “Donors love tours.” She taps the edge of my coat, exactly where the printout hides. “Guard your pocket.”
I leave the building in the kind of wind that scrubs a face clean whether it asked for absolution or not. The night smells like kelp and road salt and the last exhale of a copier. I hold my keys and imagine the hallway at Harbor Ridge High: lockers dented with history, posters about consent curling on corkboard, a floor waxed to the shine of a promise. My heart thuds once, heavy and useful.
At the curb, I look back at the office where my obedience learned to live and ask a fresh question into the dark that feels bigger than my coat:
Do I leave a note in a locker that could change a life—or do I let the clock run one more day, and risk Vivienne’s hands winding it into silence before morning?