I spread the kit across my dining table where the espresso machine used to live, the clean square of counter now my altar. The padded mailer lies open like a mouth waiting for a last word. I can still taste salt from the window air; the apartment smells faintly of kelp, lemon oil, and printer toner. I wash my hands until the motion feels ceremonial rather than compulsive, dry them with a dish towel, and lay the swab cassette on a sheet of white paper as if white could guarantee innocence.
“Step one,” I tell the empty room, because talking makes time pass in straight lines. I check the lab address—out of state, unconnected to Ellison money, recommended by a family law attorney from a different county who owes Nora a favor. I write the case identifier in small, stubborn letters. I photograph the unsealed cassette with my phone, the metadata set to include location and time. If probate counsel tries to yank a thread, I want the sweater to hold.
I peel the red tamper-evident strip from its backing and inhale adhesive, a cough of acetone and resolve. I close the cassette and lay the strip perfectly centered over the seam. The texture grabs, a hungry little rasp. I sign across the tape and the plastic in one motion so any lift tears my name in half. “Mara Ellison,” I say, pen moving, then print the date and minute. I angle the phone over it and take another photo, then a video panning slowly from the seal to the case number to my face.
Jonah’s name lights the phone before I can decide whether to text. I answer on the second buzz.
“Tell me you’re not doing this alone,” he says, voice low with the kind of careful that makes me sit up straighter.
“I’m not alone,” I say. “You’re on the line.”
“I mean physically,” he says. “Give me fifteen. Salt Finch front desk as the halfway altar?”
“Front desk,” I echo, looking toward the door where a ribbon still hangs, an idiot flag of good intentions. “You write the statement; you don’t touch the box.”
“Scout’s honor,” he says. “I was never a scout.”
“I know,” I say, smiling into the phone for the first time today. “You were a debate kid, which is worse.”
He laughs once. “Text me when you leave,” he says. “And Mara?”
“Yes.”
“Keep your camera rolling in transit. Courts love a movie.”
I end the call and return to my list. I add a second strip of tape perpendicular to the first, sign and date across it, and photograph the cross like a small, stubborn hymn. I tuck the cassette into the evidence box the kit provided, add the chain-of-custody form with my initials in the first handler line, and close the lid. The cardboard smells papery and clean. I tape that seam too, sign and date, photograph again. Then I triple-bag: inner evidence bag sealed with a numbered zip tie; outer bag with shipping label; padded mailer with a fresh strip of tape bearing my initials in the curl of the E.
My phone timer chirps: leave now to catch the courier. I slip the box into my tote, pick up the pen that feels like a weapon, and step into a hallway that tastes like dust and someone else’s dinner. Down on the street, the harbor’s air threads the block, and off-season fishermen lean against a pickup near an empty estate across from my building—men hired for winter watch, not violence, but bodies that read as caution anyway. Their thermos steam smells like burnt coffee and devotion.
Micro-hook: A black sedan rolls slowly past the curb as I lock my door. The engine purrs, pauses, and keeps going. I tuck the license plate in my head like a curse I might need later.
I drive the short curve toward the Salt Finch, the harbor to my right combed flat and pewter. Where it bends, Widow’s Teeth shoulder up, dark and sure of themselves. At the yacht club, banners droop in the cold, and a poster advertises a coming silent auction: antique sextants beside venture-capital “mentorships,” a joke in a tidy font. I imagine Vivienne in some back room ringing a donation bell no one can tell from a death knell. I tighten my hands on the wheel and rehearse lines in my head—not prayers, protocols.
The Salt Finch lobby greets me with bleach and old coffee and the neon that always flickers one stroke away from honesty. “You again,” says Dottie at the front desk, her hair piled like a storm cloud that got bored and settled. “You bringing me a scandal or just a signature?”
“A signature,” I say, placing the box on the counter’s laminate that’s been scrubbed so often the pattern is a rumor. “And a witness with clean hands.”
The door opens behind me; Jonah slips in with his winter cap pulled low, recorder in his pocket but not invited out. He shoves his hands in his coat like contraband.
“You look like a man who promised to keep his fingerprints in his pockets,” I say.
“I brought a statement,” he says, lifting a sealed envelope between two fingers. “Stamped, signed, sworn: I observed the seal intact at X time and Y place; I did not handle the specimen; chain passed from you to courier without break. Dottie, can you notarize the signature page I add to your log? I’ll do the talking and keep my hands behind my back.”
Dottie snorts. “I remember you. You paid cash for a room and a story,” she says, but she’s already pulling out the notary stamp. “Show me where to ink.”
I set my phone to record video. “State your name,” I say to camera, and Jonah obliges, voice steady, details crisp. He reads the witness statement into the lens, then slides it across to Dottie. She stamps with a satisfying thud that smells faintly of rubber and ink.
“Okay,” I say. “Step two.”
I ask for the Salt Finch courier log, which Dottie keeps in a green ledger with a cracked spine. The paper rasps under my fingers. I print the lab address, the tracking number, my name as sender, and the exact time down to the minute. Dottie watches me like a cat at a tide pool.
“You want a photo of my ledger,” she says, not a question.
“Please,” I say.
She tilts the book toward the light and holds the page down with two rings that could kill a man. I photograph the entry, the page header with the date, Dottie’s name badge, and then the box itself with the seal visible and my signature straddling tape and carton. Jonah leans in only with his eyes.
“I’ll call you when the courier signs,” Dottie says. “He comes on the eleven-thirty loop.”
“I’d like a photo of his signature, too,” I say. “With his company badge.”
“You’re the kind of woman who puts helmets on fish,” Dottie says, impressed and annoyed in equal parts. “Fine.”
Jonah clears his throat. “Run me the milestones,” he says. “Say them out loud. It helps stamp them in your head for the cross-examination that’s coming.”
I keep the camera on. “Collection by subject under self-control,” I recite. “Immediate seal by me. Tamper tape signed and dated over every seam. Photographs at each step with timestamp metadata. Witness observation at lobby—no contact by witness. Entry in neutral-site courier log. Hand-off to uniformed courier with company ID verified and photographed. Tracking number texted to witness and printed, stapled to the chain form. Delivery to out-of-state lab with receipt photo requested. All digital media backed up to offsite.”
“Say it again,” Jonah says, softer now. “For you, not for court.”
“For Tamsin,” I say. “I don’t break the chain. Not on paper. Not in my head.”
Dottie’s desk phone rings; she nods along, then hangs up. “He’s early,” she says. “I’ll buzz him through.”
We wait in the kind of silence that lets small sounds swagger. The vending machine hums like gossip. The neon sign exhale flickers. The corridor carpet offers up its secret smell: damp and sugar, like a memory. I think of burnt sugar on a spoon, the way Lark used to hold it in the blue flame until it browned and whispered.
Micro-hook: The lobby door opens, and for a second the cold rushes in so hard I can taste metal. The courier steps through, cheeks red, badge visible. I raise my phone; he raises both hands, grinning like I’m a new species of customer. “Documentation diva,” he says. “I love you people.”
“We’re rare,” I say. “May I record your badge and signature?”
“Knock yourself out,” he says, flipping the badge so the microprint catches light. “I’m signing for a murder kit once, so this is church.”
He signs Dottie’s ledger; I photograph his name beside my entry, then the box in his hands with my signature split by his grip just enough to show the ink crosses tape and cardboard. I scan the tracking label and text it to Jonah and my offsite email. The phone chirps confirmation like a small, mechanical amen.
“Handle with care,” I say, because superstition feels like an extra layer of tape.
“Always,” he says, and he’s gone, taking with him a square of certainty.
Jonah exhales. “That was clean,” he says. “Cleaner than most police departments.”
“That’s the bar?” I ask.
“In Graypoint?” he says. “Sometimes.”
We step out into the blue-gray noon. The harbor curves toward the shoal, and gulls slice the air in hysterical geometry. Jonah jams his hands deeper into his coat.
“I’ll file this statement with my attorney and email you a PDF,” he says. “Time-stamped. I’ll also send a read-only link. Two places, two locks.”
“Thank you,” I say, and I mean it the way some people mean prayer. “But stay off the sample, please.”
He touches two fingers to his forehead in a salute that remembers we were children once. “I’ll shadow you to your block,” he says. “Not close. But close enough to shout.”
“Shouting is admissible?” I ask.
“Only if it rhymes,” he says, and we both grin because we have to.
I drive home on streets that know my tires by now. The fishermen down by the estates work a thermos and a crossword; the yacht club lawn hosts two interns collecting folding chairs like penance; the auction poster flaps, offering mentorship in exchange for atonement. Widow’s Teeth hunch darker as the light thins.
I turn onto my block and there it is: a black sedan idling at the curb below my windows, the purr low and felonious. The hood gleams, showing me my own silhouette like a dare. The license plate matches the one I tucked away earlier. I park one street over and walk the long way around, phone in hand, camera set to video with sound. The exhaust smells faintly sweet, like plastic melting, which makes my throat sting.
Jonah texts: See the car. Want me to knock?
I type back: No contact. Documentation only.
I film as I approach from the far side, catching the angle of the driver’s ear, the shoes—polished, quiet money—and the detail that makes my stomach clench: a silk scarf, folded on the back seat, lemon-colored.
I stop far enough to be a pedestrian with opinions, near enough to show the building’s brick in the frame. “Hi,” I say to the open air, for the audio track later. “This is the car that has parked outside my apartment for twenty minutes with engine running. The plate is —” I read it clearly. “Time is —” I say the minute. The driver looks straight ahead. This is Graypoint: surveillance with manners.
My key feels heavier than metal when I open the door. The stairwell coughs up heat that smells like old carpet and radiator dust. I climb, pausing at the second landing to check the window. The sedan hasn’t moved. I shoot five seconds more and tuck the phone into my pocket, listening for a second set of steps that never comes.
Inside, I put the chain on the door, then the second deadbolt. I set my tote on the table where the lab receipt will live tomorrow if the world doesn’t crack. I back up the videos to an offsite folder and to the encrypted drive tucked into the hollow of a thrift-store sextant on my shelf. I email myself the tracking number again and copy Jonah. Then I write the time and plate in a notebook with a red spine, because paper remembers differently than screens.
My phone buzzes. Jonah: Car still there. I can hang back.
I text: No heroics. If they want me rattled, they can earn it in ink.
He replies with a Bell emoji, then a map pin, then nothing.
I pull the curtain just enough to see without offering my face. The sedan idles, patient as tide. Down the block, a fisherman from the pickup strolls past and tips his cap to the driver in that old Graypoint way that confuses employment and allegiance. I wonder which estate hired him this month; I wonder what they told him about me.
Micro-hook: The car blinks its turn signal once—yellow, interrogative—and then doesn’t move. I feel the question land in my chest.
I pick up my pen and press it to the chain-of-custody form where the last line waits for confirmation of delivery. My handwriting is steady now. I write: “In transit. No breaches observed.” I add the plate number in the margin like a footnote to a scripture I don’t believe in.
The radiator knocks. The harbor answers with a gull’s profanity. I sit at the table in the square of light where the machine used to live and breathe slowly so the camera in the black sedan doesn’t film me flinching.
“Okay,” I tell the room, the bell, the shoal I carry under my ribs. “This is how I protect her—on paper, in daylight, with receipts enough to survive cross-examination.”
I take one more photo of the form, of my hands, of the pen angled like a small harpoon, and I ask the question to the car outside and to whatever waits between here and tomorrow’s tracking update:
When the lab signs for the box and the receipt pings my inbox, will the signatures I aligned today be enough to hold against the hands already curling around my door?