I balance my phone on the motel’s sad little Bible like a makeshift lectern and breathe through my teeth until my tongue tastes of copper. The wall map looms to my left—Polaroids, ledger copies, red yarn veining the plaster—and every line points toward the ten digits I wrote in block letters. Widow’s Teeth growls through the window crack; the harbor’s breath is kelp and rain and metal.
I open the texting app and type the diary phrase I circled in red.
sweet tooth points home
I watch the words blink inside the blue bubble I haven’t yet sent. My thumb hovers. I delete.
are you Lina?—no. wrong bait.
Delete.
you left a candy on a clipboard and i found it—no, too naked.
Delete. I can smell lemon oil lifting from my briefcase seams, Sea Ledger’s scent hitchhiking into this motel room, making the air feel like the foyer before a verdict.
“Keep it clean,” I tell the phone. “Keep it ours.”
I type again.
sweet tooth points home. safe to speak in sugar?
I hold the phone away like it might bite. The blue Send button stares back. I set the phone down, pick up the red marker, and draw a tight circle around CALL RISK: HIGH. I uncap the marker with my teeth and realize I’m chewing plastic the way I used to chew pencils during depositions. I put the cap back on before I grind it into a confession.
I lift the phone. My thumbnail leaves a crescent moon in the silicone case. I hit send.
The sent bubble deploys like a small flare.
I screenshot, name the image Burner_Outgoing_1.png, and move it to the encrypted folder. The ritual steadies me. I log the time on a Post-it: 22:11. I listen.
Nothing.
I stand, cross to the window, and lean into the damp. Below, the cove makes its slow sickle around Graypoint, shining with a bruised sheen. Across the water, the yacht club is a white grin. Even on a weeknight, they’re auctioning consolation: antique sextants beside venture-capital “mentorships.” I hear applause, distant and smug. Old-line families hire fishermen off-season to guard empty estates; tonight those men idle in trucks at the ends of driveways, thermoses steaming, radios low. This town outsources conscience and calls it work.
I go back to the bed and sit on the edge. My knees knock once and stop. I watch the blue bubble cool on my screen. I can taste printer toner from the lobby’s inkjet in the back of my throat, ghost of the copies I made to pin a life to paper. I imagine Lark reading my message in the dark somewhere safe and saying my name without sound.
The phone vibrates.
Three dots bloom. A small, gray, throbbing promise.
“Lark?” I say to the room, too softly to count as prayer.
The dots vanish.
I swallow. I look at the wall map where the red threads meet at the Post-it with the number. Every line is proof of intention; none of it guarantees love. I pick up the recorder and speak on a whisper.
“Incoming typing indicator observed, then gone. No text yet. Time 22:19.”
I lower the phone and pace the room. Two steps to the door, three back to the window. My socks pick up grit; the carpet has decided privacy is a kind of dirt. In the glass, my reflection lifts the phone like a relic.
Dots again. Dots hold.
I stop moving. My skin goes loud—ears ringing with blood, fingertips buzzing. The dots die a second time. The wind in the window gap whistles through its teeth at me.
“Come on,” I say. “Be brave in my direction.”
The blue wallpaper of the app stares calm. I picture her arranging words the way she used to arrange seashells into long, secret sentences at the beach: stay hidden, make joy, don’t trust adults, don’t leave me. I put my hand to my sternum and press until the bone answers back.
I type without sending, to keep from screaming.
i can prove chain-of-custody. i can protect Tamsin’s name. i can burn the right thing hot enough to make candy and not ash—
I delete. Too much. Too many promises I can’t notarize tonight.
The bell in my head rings—donation? death?—and I think about the brass at Sea Ledger, how its tone is the same whether you’re giving or losing. Vivienne taught me that distinction was performative. Lark taught me the difference matters even if the ring won’t say it out loud.
The phone twitches.
Three dots. Hold. Hold.
A line arrives.
sugar burns. names burn worse.
I stop breathing. I hear my own pulse kicking coarse through my throat. I type.
i know.
i kept yours unlit.
I delete the second line and type again.
i kept yours in the dark on purpose.
Send.
Dots. Gone. Dots again.
who taught you that phrase
The room goes quiet, like the air is holding its coat. I answer with the only truth I own.
you did
vol. 8. margin. compass line
I add a single image: a cropped photo of the diary page with the candy doodle, the words sweet tooth is a compass visible, everything else redacted with a square of black.
Send. I swallow the taste of toner again because fear tastes like office supply stores when your life is evidence.
Dots blink. The reply lands like a wave hitting stone.
compass points where
I turn my head toward the harbor and let the answer come through the window crack.
home. not the house. the bell.
I’m shaking now in precise little quakes that remind me of a deposition table under my fingers when a witness decides to speak. I stare at the screen until the pixels blur.
Dots. Stop. Dots.
who else sees this thread
I stare at the wall and the single Post-it reading ASSUME MONITORING and let the temptation to lie pass through me without purchase.
me. my counsel if you consent. no press.
i won’t let vivienne near it
I catch myself and backspace “won’t,” change it to “don’t,” because right now the only verbs I can defend are present tense.
i don’t let vivienne near it
The dots hold long enough to bend time. Outside, a gull laughs into the wind like a heckler with good notes. I tuck one foot under the other to stop my leg from bouncing the bed.
she thinks she saved us
The words strike my throat like a match. I press my lips together and taste salt from the window air collecting there.
i know what she thinks
i know what she did
I add nothing more, because anything extra would be pleading and pleading is what I’m shedding.
The app is a calm blue pool. The dots surface, vanish, surface, and then the screen stays flat, unbroken. I feel time stretch like old elastic.
I pour motel coffee into a plastic cup and drink the smell of stale paper. I check the evidence wall, tug one length of yarn that droops, and anchor it tighter across the nurse ledger copy. I open the safe pouch, confirm both locket halves are sealed. My hands steady on task and shake when I stop.
The phone buzzes against the Bible and skates toward the edge. I catch it with a palm and a small oath.
don’t bring the reporter
I breathe out through my nose in two controlled beats.
i won’t
i respect consent
i learned it the hard way
Dots return so quickly they look like they never left.
low tide?
I look at the tide chart taped beside the window like a calendar I actually believe in. I read the numbers—04:47—and the scribbled note Jonah left me months ago: bell rings true at the turn. I glance up toward Sea Ledger in my mind and hear the brass sound that refuses to choose.
yes. first low
before dawn
Dots. An ache grips my ribs and then loosens.
where
I write it before doubt can set up camp.
meet at the bell
My thumb hovers. I add one more line because I can’t not.
if you hear others, leave. i’ll wait until the water starts to rise. then i go.
I set the phone down on my thigh and realize my leg is no longer bouncing. I’m breathing in a steady square—four in, four hold, four out, four hold—something the grief counselor taught at the foundation for donors pretending to be widows and widows pretending to be donors. My mouth tastes like pennies and lemon.
The reply arrives in a single line, unemotional, like a docket entry that changes everything.
meet at the bell, low tide
The room moves without moving. I screenshot. I print to the encrypted vault. I write the time: 23:58. I copy the text by hand onto a card because handwriting makes things real in this town.
My phone vibrates again, a shorter burst.
no names at shore
no light
no mother talk
I answer with three lines that feel like sandbagging a door.
agreed
dark clothes. hands visible
i come alone
I put the phone face down on the bedspread and the blue light spills sideways like a thin river. I pull on black jeans and a sweater, roll the cuffs down to my wrists. I slip the sealed locket bag and the shelter ledger copy into the inside pocket of my jacket. The zipper’s sound is teeth deciding not to bite.
I text one more time, because consent isn’t a one-and-done thing and because I want her to own the option to blink out.
if this is wrong for you, say No and i’ll vanish. i won’t track the number.
Dots. Pause. I hear a truck shift gears on the road below, a fisherman changing posts for his second job guarding an empty house. Somewhere, at Sea Ledger, the brass bell waits for my hand.
come if you want truth
The ellipsis sits a second longer, then disappears into the ordinary line of the app. I lift the phone and hold it to my sternum and let its small heat press into my bone.
I kill the lights. The wall map becomes a night coastline, red threads dulling to black. The harbor’s roar takes on a rhythm I can ride. I step into my boots and lace them tight enough to feel my pulse in my ankles. I slide the phone into my pocket and keep my palm on it, the way I used to keep a flat hand on Lark’s back when she pretended to sleep on long drives.
I stand at the door, forehead to the cool wood, and answer the question that has been drilling through me since the will’s clause cracked open my life: yes, I’ll risk a trap to meet the tide. Mercy and justice speak the same language; tonight I’ll translate by walking.
I unchain the lock. The hallway air smells like cleanser and wet wool. I picture the bell in the dark, a silhouette against the thready moon. I whisper to the phone in my pocket, to the harbor, to the wall map that has turned from mess into compass.
“I’m coming.”
I open the door and step into the night, and one final doubt coasts in on the wind’s edge: will those three words draw my sister out of hiding—or draw the hands that kept her there?