I arrive early enough that the coffee still tastes like the pot remembered to be kind. The Wayfield community hall hums with folding chairs squealing into place and the staccato rip of tape on cardboard signs. Wind follows me in, salted and impertinent, and the room answers with paper and sugar and the warm breath of people who came to help. I nod at the volunteer with the till and try to look like a woman buying nostalgia, not a woman hunting a past.
“Vintage jewelry table opens at ten,” she says, pushing a roll of tickets toward me. “Bids in whole dollars, please. No elbows.”
“I’ll use hands only,” I say, and she grins without looking up, already calculating change for a man in a Harborlight sweatshirt buying three muffins and absolution.
The hall smells of printer toner from a hard-working raffle station, lemon oil ghosting off borrowed display cases, and the faint iron note of pennies in a donation jar. Kids chase each other between tables strung with costume pearls and scout badges, their sneakers making a sound like punctuation. I move slow. This isn’t the yacht club’s silent auction with antique sextants posed beside venture-capital “mentorships” labeled as benevolence; this is the town without choreography, still making a show but missing the script.
“You keeping a list?” Pilar had asked yesterday, hand on the ledger. I keep one now. Time, place, purpose. I write as I walk: Community Hall, Wayfield; Shelter Fundraiser; 10:02; goal—vintage jewelry lot. It steadies me.
The jewelry table wears a cloth that has been washed into softness. On it: cigar tins, pill boxes, rosary fragments, tangled chains with their own weather. A shoebox with VINTAGE—LOT in a tired marker sits near the end, flaps tucked like a secret. A tag scotch-taped to the lid says: Mixed trinkets, as-is. Donated anonymously. The handwriting isn’t Pilar’s. The hairs along my wrist rise under my coat.
“Preview?” the volunteer asks, sliding closer, fingers shiny with hand cream. “No singulars yet. Lots first.”
“I’m of a lot-ish temperament,” I say. My voice warms to match my hands.
She lifts the flaps, and the hall goes a shade quieter, not with hush but with concentration. Inside: enamel pins listing to one side, a charm bracelet with three missing teeth, a match-safe with a ship scratched onto the lid, and a napkin ring that believes it’s a cuff. I hold the match-safe; the ship looks like our harbor’s crescent scar, Widow’s Teeth just a scrawl, but I don’t let myself turn omen into artifact. I set it down.
At the bottom of the box, velvet the color of rain bruises. I thumb it, and there’s an oval beneath, colder than the air, heavier than the price tag promised. I lift it into my palm. The hinge is sturdy; the edge is serrated not from neglect but by design, a jag that mirrors the locket half I keep wrapped in tissue behind a legal pad, the one I stole from the frame behind Lark’s portrait.
“I’ll start the bid,” I say, and my voice comes out steady enough to file.
“Minimum ten,” the volunteer says, pen poised over a sheet labeled with lines and optimism.
“Fifty,” I say.
She flicks me a glance over the rim of her glasses. “Someone had caffeine.”
“Someone had a week,” I say. We both smile, and then two more bidders drift in, the smell of kelp following them through the vestibule as the door opens to a cut of gray sky.
A man in a boat jacket taps the box and asks, “Any gold?”
“Any stories,” I ask back, and he laughs like we’re both wrong.
Bids shuffle. Fingers tap. The hall announces raffle numbers and someone cheers for a quilt. I stand with my hands folded, the locket warm now, the serrated edge imprinting small teeth into my lifeline. When the countdown begins—“Three minutes!”—I add five dollars to my own number, because I know Graypoint: bargains invite regret. I see only ordinary faces, no scarf bright enough to burn. When the volunteer raps the table with a ruler, I win my past by a narrow breath.
“Payment here,” she says. “We take cash, card, and clean conscience.”
“I have two of the three,” I say, sliding a card across. The till dings a sound that makes me think of the brass bell at Sea Ledger, donation and death sharing a tone that can’t be told apart. She prints a receipt that smells fresh and official, and I ask her to write “Mixed trinkets box incl. oval locket” on the line. She obliges without comment, then staples the tag to the slip.
Micro-hook: I pull an evidence bag from my coat pocket—zipper top, chain-of-custody label—and the volunteer raises an eyebrow that tells me she could be a notary on her lunch break.
“Old habit,” I say. “Paralegal. Probate.”
“That one?” she asks, glancing toward the Edge of the World where Graypoint lives on maps. I nod. “Then you know to put the time twice.”
I do. I write 10:28, and 10:29 for the moment the bag closes. The zipper seals with a small animal sound. I take a photograph on my phone of the bag, the receipt, the table, my wristwatch. I email it to myself and to a cloud folder labeled with a name that means nothing to anyone but me.
I carry the box to a corner where a bulletin board offers babysitters and tutoring in careful block letters. I sit on a chair that takes my weight without complaint, lay the bag across my knees, and talk to myself like a witness.
“I’m going to open you,” I tell the locket. “I’m going to do it here, in public, because sunlight is its own notarization.”
I slit the evidence bag along the seam with the edge of a library card rather than risk a pocketknife that would make a scene. I lift the locket with two fingers and angle it toward the light that slants from the high windows. The hinge gives, not reluctant, just dignified. The oval opens.
On the left: empty silk. On the right: a photo so small it makes me blink tears into my eyelashes to sharpen it. No face, no adult, just a newborn’s hand curled against a thin blanket, the thumb turned toward me like a secret code. On the pad of that thumb: a shallow crescent where heat once kissed skin too soft to fight it. A sugar-burn scar.
I touch my own thumb to my teeth, a reflex from childhood when Lark and I tested the edge of everything. In Lark’s diaries she called it the sweet tooth, the day she tipped a caramel spoon and marked her baby, then wrote: sorry, sorry, sweet tooth, I’ll keep you safe. I have a picture now to match a sentence and a bruise of love.
“Excuse me,” a woman to my left says, gentle. “Is it OK to sit? My knees think I’m older.”
“We can be older together,” I say, scooting my box. She smells like library stacks after rain, the same mix of starch and paper. She doesn’t look at my hands, which I appreciate more than I can measure.
“That’s pretty,” she says anyway, after a respectful quiet.
“It’s particular,” I answer, and close the locket softly, letting the halves kiss. The serrated edge bears a small notch on the north side, a notch I know matches the one in the half that lived behind Lark’s portrait—a designed join, not a random break.
I re-open the bag, slide the locket in, and add the receipt, the price tag, the bid sheet photocopy the volunteer offers when I ask. I photograph the re-seal and the board with our feet in frame. My hands are steady now the way hands are steady when a verdict lands before a judge speaks it.
“Gift?” the woman asks, and I hear only kindness.
“Family matter,” I say. “The kind that asks a room to help.”
She pats my arm. “This room does,” she says. “People forget.”
Another announcement ripples across the hall—brownies for a dollar, and someone mispronounces Graypoint in the raffle call the way out-of-towners do. I stand and the chair scolds me back with a squeak. The box on my arm feels light; the bag in my pocket has gravity.
Micro-hook: On my way past the bake sale, I stop and buy a single wrapped caramel. I don’t eat it. I slide it into the evidence pouch’s outer pocket and label it: symbol, not exhibit.
Outside, the air slaps my cheeks awake. The harbor’s curve is a rumor this far inland, but my body keeps its map; my feet align with the angle the shore takes when storms get ideas. Old-line families in this season hire fishermen to guard empty estates; they don’t think about the community hall until they need to borrow its virtue. I think about that as I breathe and let the salt clear the paper dust from my lungs.
My phone buzzes with a text from an unknown number: Nice find at the jewelry table. I don’t reply. I screenshot, tag it with time and location, and forward it to the folder. My righteous calm arrives not as fire but as cold water over a fever. I look left and right; no scarf on the corner, no Bentley in a disguise. Just a bench with a flyer for a babysitter named T. who likes science and cares for plants.
I sit and open my notebook. I draw the locket halves—the one from the portrait, the one from the box—then sketch the serrations and the notch, lines careful enough to pass an archivist’s inspection. Beside it I copy the sentence from the certified ledger: Infant safe. Under that: Sugar-burn scar—thumb—photo. I underline twice because I’ve learned that underlines are the scaffold that holds anger up until justice can carry it.
“You all right?” the volunteer from the till asks, walking out for a breath with a cup of coffee that has been kind to no one.
“I am,” I say, and it surprises me with its correctness.
“You looked like a verdict,” she says. “We don’t see that face often at fundraisers.”
“We will,” I say, and I stand because my legs want the rest of me to match our intent.
“Keep the receipt,” she reminds. “Judges love receipts.”
“So do ghosts,” I answer, and we both laugh enough to be strangers again.
I head for my car and the road that leads back to Graypoint like a stitch, small and tight. As I drive, the town shows me its winter face: fishermen patching nets in a lot behind a shuttered diner; a kid on a bike with a crate of bread tied down with hope; a church sign with a typo that makes mercy and money rhyme. Widow’s Teeth gnashes pale at the far horizon when the road lifts high enough to tease the water into view.
At a red light I take out the locket bag and hold it to the window where light can bless it. The infant’s thumb glows through plastic only in my head, but it is enough. I open a voice memo and narrate: “Chain-of-custody continuation. Acquisition: Wayfield Community Hall fundraiser, ten thirty. Witnesses: volunteer cashier, two bidders unident. Contents: box of trinkets including oval locket half with serrated edge; interior photo of infant’s hand with sugar-burn scar on thumb. This half appears designed to interlock with prior-recovered locket. Purpose: corroborate Tamsin’s identity as Lark’s child.” I save it. I duplicate it. I send it to Jonah with the subject line: Artifact, not to air. I send it to Nora with: For indexing only. I don’t send it to Vivienne.
Not yet.
The brass ship’s bell that lives in my chest rings once, and I choose to hear donation rather than death. I pass the turnoff to the yacht club where sextants will gleam under polite lighting next month, and I picture the locket halves kissing, a join that refuses to perform for donors. Protecting family can mean hiding or revealing; in my rearview, the hall shrinks, but the sentence from the ledger swells until it’s the size of the sky.
At the edge of town, cell service catches on like a coat snagging a nail. My phone lights with a voicemail from a blocked number. I don’t press play. I know her cadence so well I can hear it without sound: my mother’s voice making mercy and management share a mouth.
I turn into the road that climbs to Sea Ledger, the cliff patched with caution tape where our patio once pretended at permanence. Gulls wheel like punctuation over the crack. I tuck the evidence bag inside my coat and button the buttons all the way up.
At the top of the drive, I park and sit with the engine ticking its small, hot clicks. I hold the locket between my palms and lean my forehead to the steering wheel until I can feel the line between tenderness and certainty settle into a bright, cold calm.
Then I ask the next question out loud, because the wind will carry it where it needs to go: when I put both halves on the solarium table in front of Vivienne, will she finally speak truth as love—or will she try to rename the scar?