Rain needles my scalp through the hood as I shoulder the gate off its track, the manual release grinding like a cough. The parking lot lights smear on wet asphalt; the orange doors line up with cheerful malice. I hear the harbor two streets away—storm water sluicing gutters toward the crescent scar and its single shoal, Widow’s Teeth chewing at the dark. The town smells of kelp dragged inland, lemon oil ghosting from my coat’s cuff, and printer toner from the forms in my bag.
Jonah swings out of his hatchback with a duffel and a grin that fails to light. “Gate stalled?” he asks, voice low.
“Dead again,” I say, and show him the brass key Beatrice taped under her pillowcase. “Unit 24C.”
“We’re racing whoever killed that camera,” he says, scanning the street. Rain has slicked his hair flat; he shakes his head like a dog and points with his chin. “We go simple. In, bag, out.”
“Simple costs extra,” I say, and my palms say the price by sweating inside my gloves.
We move in the narrow corridor of doors, each metal slat a ribcage. The keypad at the corner blinks back to life with a sulky green dot. A gull screams on the chain-link, then lifts and disappears toward the harbor’s bruise. I keep my footsteps quiet and count—Row B, Row C—until the stamped numbers reach me.
24C.
The lock is a thin brass theater prop, better at promising security than giving it. I slide the bolt cutters from Jonah’s duffel. Their handles are cold, textured with a rubber grit that bites my wet gloves. I seat the jaws around the lock’s waist. The metal resists like a clenched jaw, then pops with a small, rude cough.
“Flimsy,” Jonah mutters. “Grateful.”
“Record,” I say, and he lifts his phone, camera off network, timestamped to his offline recorder. I narrate into his mic: “Unit 24C, Midland Self-Storage, Harbor Road. Entry at” —I check my watch— “05:42. Key supplied by owner Beatrice Sloan, with permission, chain-of-custody to follow.”
He nods approval I don’t need and I roll up the door. The slats rattle, loud as a confession.
The unit exhales stale cardboard, dryer sheets, a medicinal shadow of lemon. Three clear bins sit on a low shelf beside a used hospital laundry bag. On top: a stack of spiral notebooks rubber-banded in twos, each spine labeled in a tidy nurse hand—NIGHT LOGS 1, PAY DISB 2, BRACE TRACK, CALL-INS. My throat tightens around a thank-you I will owe until I die.
“You take photos,” I say. “I flip and bag.”
“Go,” he says.
I peel the band from BRACE TRACK and open to a page that punches air from me.
Date. Time. Infant ID. Mother initials. Bracelet numbers before/after. Notation: asterisk placed or asterisk removed. A column for Instr., where initials appear I know too well from foundation minutes and gala programs. Beside one: V.E.—hold until donor present. My fingers tremble and lay flat.
“Tell me,” Jonah whispers, camera over my shoulder but careful not to crowd.
“Multiple nights,” I say. “Cross-shifts. Same initials repeating. ‘Bereavement grant’ codes written in margins. Look—board members by nickname.”
He breathes out through his nose. “They industrialized a tragedy. Of course they did.”
I turn a page and read entries dated across seven years. A note in a different pen: Apologize to K. mother. Another: Springfest—extra staff. I can smell the chalkboard at Harborlight where they list tides alongside oysters, the same handwriting politeness covering a sharper reality. Protecting family, the town says, means keeping stories inside the house; revealing them means burning it down. Mercy and justice speak the same language and stamp different sentences.
“We have to take them all,” I say. “Redact later. Copy thrice. Hide one where a sextant used to live.”
“Bag one, scan two,” Jonah says, and unzips a padded sleeve. He slides in BRACE TRACK, then holds out a fresh sleeve for PAY DISB 2.
I open that one and meet columns of numbers like hymn stanzas: Vendor—Foundation Outreach—Cash; Board Fund—Special Circ.; Bereavement. Beside them, initials that match the offshore lawyer’s calendar Ethan forwarded last night. I taste salt and toner again, one from the harbor threading into the other.
Footsteps tap the corridor outside and my mouth goes as dry as an affidavit. I lift my head and catch the stuttering of fluorescents across the ridged door—light broken by a moving shape. A shadow glides past the slats, slow, weighing doors by the look of them.
Jonah’s eyes slice to mine. He pinches his recorder and taps it three times to mark the moment. Without speaking, he points to the corner where the roll-up meets concrete and mimes lowering it an inch.
I ease the door down to a hand’s width above the ground. Light thins. We become breath and heartbeat and the small tick of rain on metal. The footsteps stop. The shadow lingers, crescented by a briefcase edge. Suited.
“Two minutes,” a man’s voice says to a phone in his palm. The tone is tidy, trained not to carry. “Then we cut.”
Panic lands on my shoulders like a wet coat. Jonah’s hand leans against my forearm, anchoring me without pinning. He mouths: back. I scan the unit for a second exit, laugh at myself inside—it’s a rectangle with metal ribs and no mercy.
“We could lock it,” I breathe against Jonah’s ear. “No, cut already done.”
“Quiet,” he whispers. “Finish.”
I slide the remaining notebooks into sleeves with the aching care of a midwife. NIGHT LOGS 1 shows shifts and staff initials threaded like fishing line: Beatrice’s in a column long as a winter. A post-it flutters loose: Unit 24C key spare—pillowcase—don’t tell M. My throat flares with heat.
Outside, a second shadow joins the first—taller, the stance of someone who hires fishermen to guard a house in the off-season and confuses that with honor. The second man’s shoes make no sound; leather that eats its own noise.
“What’s your door, sir?” the taller one asks, a Graypoint unctuousness smoothing threat into RSVP.
“Twenty-four,” the first man says. “C.”
The syllables land like a stamp.
Jonah looks at me; I’m already reaching for the laundry bag. We tip the remaining bin’s content—the notebooks in sleeves, a manila envelope stamped with the hospital’s old logo, a zip folder of polaroids—into the bag’s yawning throat. I snug the drawstring and shoulder it. Weight drags me toward gravity and I welcome the fact of it.
The lock outside clinks. A threaded rod slides, metal on metal like a boat rope under strain. I imagine bolt cutters bigger than mine. I imagine the yacht club’s silent auction, a lot listing: Bolt cutters, “donor-grade,” includes mentorship.
“Time,” Jonah mouths.
I glance toward the back wall. A rectangle of drywall is cut cleaner than maintenance would cut, re-screwed with two mismatched screws. I palm my multi-tool, flick the driver, and turn. The screw squeaks like a rat. The second gives a tiny cry and comes away. Behind the panel: another unit’s spine, a hollow where wiring should be, a twelve-inch path to the service corridor that runs behind Row C.
“Jonah,” I whisper, voice now a tool, “through.”
He sucks a breath, nods, and lifts the panel free. I push the laundry bag into the gap. It grinds, then slides with a plastic sigh. He dives after it, shoulders compressed, breath counting. I follow, scraping my coat, my hair snagging on something that smells like dust and old invoices.
The external lock cracks. A cuss word. The roll-up in our unit shivers.
I belly through, drop into the service corridor, and pull the panel back into place. My hands shake so hard the screws misalign. Jonah squeezes my wrist steady and the bit finds home.
“Go,” he whispers.
We ghost to the end of the narrow behind-world and step out into open air. Rain hits my face like relief with teeth. The back gate is padlocked. Jonah’s cutters make quick work of it. He catches the cut halves before they clatter, muscles taut, face intent.
“Left around the dumpster,” he says. “Then street.”
“Wait.” I bend, find a bit of wire, and thread the lock back through the clasp to look intact. I was raised by people who staged grief; I can stage a lock.
We run. The laundry bag thumps my spine with each step, the notebooks within talking to one another in quiet, papery syllables. By the time we reach his hatchback, my breath has saw teeth. He tosses his duffel in first, then the bag, then me. We slam doors, he starts the engine, and rain against the windshield smears the world into a courtroom watercolor.
“Seatbelt,” he says. He says it to keep from swearing.
“Seatbelt,” I echo, and click in. “Drive nice.”
He nods and pulls out like a donor leaving a gala—unhurried, certain the world will pause for him. We pass the front gate. Two men stand under the awning: one in a suit, cutting bolt glitter from twenty-four, the other in a windbreaker that reads Security in a font that cost less than lunch. Suited eyes track taillights by habit and then discard us because we match the weather.
“They’ll know,” I say, not looking back. “They’ll read the dust.”
“Dust is a memoir,” Jonah says. “We edited.”
We turn toward the harbor. Graypoint is a watercolor of slate roofs and guilty hedges. A fisherman in a knit watch cap leans against a Seabrook estate’s gatehouse, hired to guard emptiness; his thermos steams as we pass. The brass ship’s bell at Sea Ledger would ring the same for donation or death, and both meanings toll in my chest.
“Open one,” Jonah says. “We need to know what we’re risking for.”
I unzip the laundry bag just enough to slide out the manila envelope. Inside: carbon copies of bereavement grant forms, each with a handwritten memo line leading to a donor-coded fund. A familiar signature loops in the corner—Vivienne’s favorite counsel, initials flourishing like a peacock tail.
“It’s all there,” I say. My throat is raw. “Payoffs. Swaps. Requests for ‘discretionary reassignments.’”
“Dates?”
“Seven years’ spread,” I say. “With upticks around gala weekends. Springfest. The yacht club auction.” I trace one with my finger. “Antique sextants beside venture ‘mentorships’—and downstairs this.”
Rain thickens into a curtain. Wipers scrape a rhythm that sounds like an old ledger page turned by a dry hand. My phone buzzes: Unknown again. I let it roll to transcript. Return property—police report pending. There’s a callback number like a dare.
Jonah glances into the rearview and says nothing. I feel the words in my body, a flare then a clamp. “We can be charged,” I say. “Theft. Tampering.”
“We can be buried,” he says. “Pick your shovel.”
We crest the hill where the harbor shows itself. Widow’s Teeth throws white lace over gray skin. The smell of kelp rises even through the car’s vents. Below, the foundation’s roofline makes a pious silhouette.
Headlights appear in the mirror—mid-sized sedan, gray paint, patient distance. It doesn’t jiggle with delivery anxiety or drift with tourist curiosity. It sits. It breathes when we breathe.
“Company,” I say without turning.
“Saw them at the light,” Jonah answers. “Same lane. No pass.”
“Plate?”
“Rhode Island,” he says. “Dealer frame. Cute.”
The adrenaline that launched me through plaster mutates into a low, productive dread. I pull the laundry bag’s drawstring and wrap it twice around my wrist like a tether. “We split,” I say. “I take the logs; you take decoy.”
“We don’t split,” he says. “That’s a horror movie and this is a lawsuit.”
“We need offsite,” I say. “Now. Scan and scatter.”
“Salt Finch,” he says. “Then Nora’s secret copier if she’ll open early.”
“Aren’t we already in enough trouble?”
“We’re in the correct amount of trouble,” he says, and makes a left that looks like a right until the last second, testing the sedan’s patience.
The car behind us signals late, then follows, the indicator’s tic a metronome for my resolve. I feel the weight of Beatrice’s apology sitting in the laundry bag beside the math of her logs. Protecting family can mean hiding truth or revealing it; both can destroy the beloved. I want to choose correctly and know there is no correct, only brave and less brave.
Jonah reaches across the console and flips open the glove box. Inside, he keeps a sheaf of printed consent letters he uses for interviews, a portable scanner, and a bag of sunflower seeds he pretends are a virtue. He pushes the scanner toward me without looking. “Get a dozen pages,” he says. “If they box us in, you run. I’ll eat the charge.”
“No,” I say. “We both eat. But we swallow different bites.”
Rain drums harder, the sedan’s lights smear longer in our mirror, and Graypoint’s harbor pulls all roads toward the Teeth. I slide the first notebook’s cover back, feed a page into the scanner’s mouth, and watch the bar of light crawl like dawn across names that bought mercy and called it justice. The scanner chirps its tiny, brave accomplishment.
“They’re still there,” Jonah says, accelerating gently, careful to look like good citizens. “What’s our next turn?”
I look up, read the street grid I’ve known since childhood, and answer with a route that takes us past the yacht club’s banners and toward the Salt Finch’s flicker. I keep scanning. I keep breathing. I keep one eye on the mirror where a gray patience hangs back, deciding what we’re worth.
“Do we call the judge?” Jonah asks.
“We call no one,” I say. “We file.”
“And if they stop us before we get to a file?”
I pull the drawstring tighter and let the question float in the car like a weather warning. The scanner hums. The wipers drag. Widow’s Teeth gnash in the near distance, loud enough that I imagine the sound in my bones. The sedan blinks once and settles back to its chosen distance, and I ask the road—and the rain and the harbor and every bell I’ve ever rung—how far a tail will go for a story that wants to live.