I know the door is wrong before I reach it; the hallway carries the smell of fresh pine and gouged varnish, the way a carpenter’s shop does right after a blade bites. The brass number tilts like a loose tooth. Splinters fan out from the deadbolt like a star chart.
I push with the heel of my hand. The door yaws, scrapes, and stops at the chain that no longer exists. It dangles from a twisted screw like a necklace cut mid-party.
“Hello?” I call, not because I expect an answer, but because my voice needs to touch the corners before my feet do.
The living room meets me with a studied calm. Cushions sit prim. My mug waits on the coaster where I left it, tea a cold skin. Drawers sleep in their frames, handles straight. The quiet reads as politeness, not mercy.
The floor’s empty space hits me last, the way a missing tooth does—you keep tonguing the hole, surprised to find absence has edges. Three boxes gone. The ones I kept layered in plain sight under a quilt, labeled “tax records” in block letters that lied with a straight face.
I step closer. Dust rectangles show where cardboard once lived. A pale strand of red yarn clings to the rug like a capillary. I don’t touch it. I don’t breathe on it.
The wall above the empty space carries the message they want more than the theft to speak. A note, folded once. Pinned not with a tack but with a silver oyster fork, the kind the yacht club sells at the silent auction between antique sextants and venture-capital “mentorships.” The tines make a shallow cross through paper and paint.
“Unclaimed stays safe.”
I say the words out loud, tasting metal as if the ink carries salt. “Not for long.”
I take a photo. Then six more: wide, medium, detail. I frame the fork, the fold, the hole the tines punched into my lease along with the wall. Widow’s Teeth roar faint under the windows, the harbor’s low-tide lungs pulling and pushing their breath through town.
I call Jonah.
“I need you here,” I say when he answers. “Door broken. Boxes gone. We’ve got a fork that thinks it’s a signature.”
“Stay in the hall,” he says. “Don’t contaminate. I’m two streets away.”
I pace the runner, counting nail heads, cataloging what isn’t disturbed. The TV is still dusted in its rectangle of neglect. My dresser drawers keep their panic to themselves. Only the files moved. No jewelry, no laptop, no cash. Mercy and justice speak the same language, but this is neither; this is a dialect called message.
Jonah arrives with his shoulders set like weather. He doesn’t cross the threshold until he sweeps his flashlight along the jamb. “Clean break,” he says. “No pried metal. That’s a bump key or a drill sleeve and a kick.”
“They took only what hurts,” I say. “Three boxes. The deposition drive clone. The unit logs. Vendor clipboard originals.”
He looks at the oyster fork and snorts. “Club cute.”
“Deadly cute,” I answer. “They want me to know who can still buy favors off-season.”
He studies the note. “Unclaimed stays safe,” he reads. “Message to Lark? Or to you about Tamsin?”
“Both,” I say. “And to any witness who thinks naming names buys safety.”
I call the police. My voice stays level when the dispatcher asks if anyone is injured. “Only the future,” I say, and instantly regret giving the night that line to chew on.
We wait by the window. The harbor curves in the frame like a crescent scar, lights tracing the arc from pier to shoal. Old-line families hire fishermen to guard empty estates; tonight, the trawlers idle out there guarding nothing I own. The room smells of sawdust, cold tea, and the faint, medicinal tang of printer toner from the envelope in my bag.
Jonah keeps his voice low. “Backups?”
“Offsite,” I say. “Two. One safety deposit box. One inside a sextant at Sea Ledger. The boardroom bell heard me decide to go tonight.”
“You shouldn’t go alone.”
“I won’t,” I say. “But first we make this official.”
The officers arrive tired. Their radios hiss traffic I’m not allowed to translate. One of them taps the broken wood with a pen like he’s taking a pulse. The other shines a light across the wall and whistles at the fork, impressed or amused.
“You own that?” the pen-tapper asks.
“I own the paint under it,” I say. “The fork belongs to the person who broke in.”
He grunts, writes. “Anything missing besides boxes?”
“Boxes are everything,” I say. “Documents, originals, chain-of-custody labels. Drives.”
“Serial numbers on the drives?”
“Yes,” I say, and hand him a list because I knew this question would come and made my future self the gift of preparedness.
He nods without reading. “Insurance?”
“Not for stolen futures,” I say. “But I’ll file.”
The second officer squints at the note. “Unclaimed stays safe. What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s the old Graypoint lullaby,” Jonah says, dry. “Keep quiet; stay funded.”
“We don’t get into politics,” pen-tapper says.
“Then get into burglary,” I say, keeping my tone neutral. “You have my neighbor’s camera inbound? The hallway lens points right at my door.”
He shrugs. “We’ll ask. Did you see anyone?”
“No,” I say. “But someone saw us in the boardroom tonight.” I hold his gaze. “This isn’t random.”
He writes “unknown suspect” like it’s scripture. He gives me a card with a case number stamped into it. “We’ll let you know.”
“You want the fork for prints?” I ask.
“You can take it down,” he says. “Or leave it for your landlord.”
He doesn’t bag it. He doesn’t photograph it. He doesn’t do anything I’d teach a paralegal to look for in a file. Mercy and justice have different syntax; bureaucracy prefers passive voice.
When the door clicks behind them, my apartment exhales into the space they leave.
Jonah leans against the window frame, arms crossed. “They wanted us to watch the performance of caring,” he says. “Now we do the work.”
“We go now,” I say. “Safety deposit first.”
“We could wait for daylight.”
“He didn’t wait to kick my door,” I answer. “I won’t give him sunrise.”
We pull the note free with a dish towel and drop the fork into a zip bag. It’s hefty in my hand, cold with a temperature that refuses my skin. I taste brine in the back of my mouth, the oyster bar’s ghost creeping into my kitchen. I imagine the silent auction table, sextants gleaming, forks ranked like miniature tridents, and bids written by hands that mistake philanthropy for absolution.
“Leave the note?” Jonah asks.
“No,” I say, and fold it once, mirroring their precision. “I want the judge to see the font of threat.”
I sweep the room for trackers. I’ve learned to drag my phone’s light under tables, through plant pots, along baseboards. I find a black dot disguised as felt under a chair leg pad. It sticks to my finger with mean glue.
“Move, and they follow,” Jonah says.
“Good,” I answer. “Let them break their masks on a courthouse door.”
He studies me. “You’re shaking.”
I look at my hands. They tremble like a plucked wire still ringing. “Violated,” I say, naming it so it doesn’t own me. Then, like tightening a screw, I twist the feeling until the thread catches. “Now focused.”
We lock what we can lock. I slide a chair under the compromised knob because theatre comforts; then I pocket the drive catalog and the spare keys. I take the business card from last night’s envelope and slide it into my wallet. I don’t intend to use it, but I want a name near my cash tonight.
The stairwell holds fry oil from the diner with the dawn pies, marine rope from the neighbor’s gear bag, and a bleached whiff of the building’s weekly scrubbing. We step into air that wears the harbor like a shawl. Fog lifts off the water in thin strips, the shoal muttering in the language of teeth.
“He still has resources,” Jonah says as we cross to his car. “Suspension is a pause, not poverty.”
“He has reach,” I say. “I have process.”
“And I have a trunk with a blanket and a thermos because I grew up in a town that teaches precautions before letters,” he says. “Get in.”
The tires hum toward downtown. Streetlights throw slices of amber across the dash like slices of old film. The bank sits squat, a brick certainty that has outlived three storms and the idea that respectability is always solvent. My box waits behind two signatures and a guard who reads faces like balance sheets.
We park. I pause with my hand on the door handle. “If they’re watching—”
“They know we’re alive,” Jonah says. “Let them know we’re disciplined.”
Inside, the guard blinks at the case number card in my fingers, then at my ID. I sign. He buzzes the gate. In the vault, the air smells like paper that knows it will outlast us, and like lemon from the cloth they use to keep brass from darkening into honesty.
I slide the box onto the table and lift the lid. Inside: the encrypted drive, orange as a buoy. A paper copy of the deposition attestation with signatures and a notary stamp I can still hear like a heartbeat. A locket half I didn’t want to leave in a motel drawer. I touch none of it with bare hands.
“We split,” I say. “One copy with me, one with you, one back to the sextant.”
“Three points make a triangle,” Jonah says. “Triangles don’t collapse easy.”
We reseal, re-stow, re-sign. The motions steady me the way reciting the alphabet can steady a kid with a bloody knee. Outside, the fog has inched inland to lick the bank’s steps. Graypoint wears secrecy like perfume, not armor.
The car fills with the thermos’s coffee smell when Jonah twists the cap. I drink without tasting. “Next stop,” he says.
“Sea Ledger,” I say. “The sextant waits.”
“Vivienne?”
“Sleeping in a house that mistakes glass for protection,” I say. “She warned me about blowback. She didn’t warn me about forks.”
We drive the cliff road where the estate lights float among dark firs. The wind carries kelp and the iron breath of storm rails that bolt the cliff walk. The bell hangs asleep in the vestibule window like a muted moon.
Jonah kills the engine. “We do this fast,” he says. “In and out.”
“In,” I say. “Out with proof.”
I step onto the gravel and every stone clicks under my boot. The house rises, all angles and memory. I feel the ransacked rooms back in town tug on my spine with a string that reaches this porch. I knock anyway because I was raised to announce myself to my own ghosts.
The fire escape at my apartment complains in that moment, a scrape inside my head that isn’t a memory. It’s present and sharp, a small metal scream someone forgot to muffle. Jonah’s eyes flick to mine.
“You heard that too,” he says.
“Yes,” I say, and the word hardens. “We’re not done being watched.”
I look at the dark panes and imagine a reflection that isn’t mine peering from the city window I left behind. The note waits in my bag, its fold a crease through my pocket against my thigh. The sextant waits in the archive room, brass smelling like the past pretends to be clean.
“We move,” I say, and my voice finds the furious center it has been circling all night. “We take back the story before morning learns their line.”
A gust lifts the lemon polish from the door seam and the sea from the cliff in one breath. Widow’s Teeth grind below the curve of the harbor like the old gods clearing their jaws. I press my palm to the latch.
The question lodges between skin and metal and refuses to be swallowed: did I keep enough truth out of their hands to win—or did I bring the last piece here for them to collect at the threshold?