The locker corridor behind the Salt Finch runs like a throat—narrow, cold, tasting faintly of rust and bleach. Neon from the office buzzes through the door seam, pink and tired. I fit the little brass key into the RollCo cylinder and steady the corrugated handle. Metal teeth complain, and the door groans up rib by rib until a draft of sweet, scorched air breathes over my face.
“Hi,” I say to the dark space. I hear my voice flatten against cardboard and concrete. “It’s me.”
The first box nearest the opening wears a tidy stencil that reads CANDY. So does the second, and the third. Someone—Lark—stacked them in columns like a city of sugar. The locker smells like a kitchen at midnight: caramel caught one second past perfect, paper warmed by a pilot light. Underneath rides Graypoint’s background notes—kelp and damp rope, the town’s salt breath sneaking inland to remind me who sets the weather.
I slide on cotton gloves and tug the top box down. Tape rips with a sound like paper skin. Inside, spiral-bound notebooks lie belly-down on one another, pastel covers peppered with grease freckles and thumb-worn edges. A ribbon fray peeks out from one, dyed a soft bruise of blue. I lift it, and the scent blooms—burnt sugar and something cleaner: lemon oil. Lark always cleaned after she made a mess; she used my mother’s polish on a cutting board, once, and we ate cake tasting of ship decks for a week.
“What did you do,” I whisper, and the ribbon brushes my wrist like a dare.
I open to the middle. A page waits in Lark’s teenage hand—tilted, theatrical, looping its y’s like kites. Across the top she wrote: “A recipe for quiet: melt sugar, add names.” Below, lines unspool into poetry that tries hard and cuts anyway.
I learn sweetness buys silence
faster than coins.
I bag quiet in paper like taffy.
They suck and say thank you.
My throat tightens where grief lives like a bad anchor. I let the stanza sit, then turn the page with the care I use on wills when I suspect a corner hides a date. The next spread is not a poem. It’s a ledger, tidy and ruthless. Three columns in block letters: NAME / DATE / BLOOD TYPE. Each line ends with a shorthand candy icon—SC (sea salt caramels), LM (lemon meltaways), BC (burnt caramels). A fourth column crowds the margin with abbreviations I recognize from the hush ledger I copied downstairs at Berridge & Knox: BG (bereavement grant), RC (retention check), QC (quiet counseling).
“You built a translation,” I say to the notebooks. “Candy for cash, sweets for secrets.”
I read down the page. Donor wives and board aides. A fisherman whose name I know from town hall minutes—his blood type O-, rare and useful, circled twice. A date that kisses the week before Lark’s “accident.” My gloved fingers hover over each entry like a blessing I have no right to give.
I turn another page. A sketch of Graypoint’s harbor sits in the top corner, love-drunk and accurate: the crescent-scar curve, the shoal’s snaggle of rocks—Widow’s Teeth—drawn as a grin that lost a fight. Next to it she wrote, “storms funnel into what we refuse to name.” My chest tightens again, but my lungs obey this time. Widow’s Teeth taught me how to breathe around loss; the shoal didn’t move, I did.
A micro-hook catches the softest part of me: halfway down the margin a line reads, “Sweetness buys silence.” Not poem-voice, but record-voice. Below it, a numbered set of transactions maps caramels to checks. 1) SC—V.E. to B.S.—bracelet—2k—call first. The initials are the same I copied onto my arm, now covered beneath my shirt like a bruise I refuse to show.
“You were right,” I tell the blue ribbon. “I do know.”
Further in, the books get more deliberate. The pastel covers give way to composition marbles with spines reinforced by tape. Tabs bloom from the edges—red for dates, blue for names, yellow for T. I stop when I see the yellow crowding three pages in a row.
“Okay,” I breathe. “Okay.” I set the first yellow-tabbed book on the open box lid to make a desk and angle my phone face-down beside it so the tiny lens won’t betray me. If Vivienne asks me what I took, I want to be able to say nothing but dust. Dust and words are not “documents” in the way a partner wants to seize.
I slide a sticky note from my pocket—acid-free, habit—and write the locker number with my initials and time, a private chain-of-custody for paper that belonged to the girl who haunted our family portrait. Then I open to the first yellow tag.
At the top of the page Lark has written: “T is safe when quiet tastes like burnt sugar.” The handwriting is slower, the loops tamed. She’s older here, maybe seventeen. The list below is all ledger—no lyric. T—8/7—A+—sweet tooth scar (thumb). T—9/1—Womens’ shelter run—SC (no nut). T—9/3—clinic—no names—3am. In the margin she adds “wear my name until you don’t.”
I rub my forearm over my sleeve, feeling the dent of pencil where I wrote the bracelet number. “T,” I whisper into the locker. “You wore the wrong name and lived.”
I turn the page. More yellow. T—don’t publish—only trust M. My name lands like a thrown penny. She used the initial, but it still rings. I put a hand flat on the paper to steady it, then lift quickly, guilty about leaving oil, even through gloves. The entry continues: “if M reads: the sweetness isn’t candy; it’s cover. Deliveries are routes. Boxes are excuses. I can walk a car into any neighborhood with a trunk of sugar.”
“You were running supply lines,” I say. My voice shakes the dust. “And running stories backwards.”
I flip again. A list titled “Sugar—Conversions” breaks the code outright: SC = $500 card in tissue. LM = cash in lemon tin. BC = NDA packet taped under lid. Each candy is a dollar amount or a document, sometimes both. Beside BC she’s drawn a tiny bell. “Ring once for yes,” she wrote. “Twice for a receipt.”
The brass bell at Sea Ledger answers in my head, the sound from the funeral crawling backward through time to every check, every tin. I smell lemon oil and hear the harbor; I see the yacht club’s silent auction—antique sextants glinting under halogen, “mentorships” folded in envelopes like raffle prizes the rich award each other. I think about off-season fishermen hired to guard empty estates—paid to watch windows, paid not to watch the wrong doors. Graypoint pretends charity, and the town pretends to believe.
“Protecting family can taste like fraud,” I tell the locker. “But it’s still baked with love.”
Another micro-hook tugs. T appears again, threaded through a paragraph that reads like a prayer edited by an accountant.
T—no father on paperwork—keep blood type off public forms.
If widow’s teeth chew our names, keep the child’s intact.
M, if you find this, burn sugar on the stove until it smokes. Then open a window. You’ll know why.
My eyes sting at the instruction, ridiculous and specific. I see us at the estate kitchen: Lark at the stove with a copper pot; me on stool duty, legs sweaty on vinyl, watching sugar tip from clear to straw to amber while Vivienne called down a rule about not eating before dinner. Lark slid a spoonful onto the counter and nicked it with her thumb. Later her thumb bore a crescent scar where the sugar kissed too hot—sweet tooth, she called it, proud. She pressed that scar to my shoulder when I cried in sixth grade and left a tacky half-moon.
I turn to the back of the notebook. A single sheet, loose, falls into my lap. The paper wears grease through the center where fingers traced it many times. Across it she’s drawn a baby’s wrist with a hospital band. Two names ghost each other, the top blotted: LARK ELLISON struck and faded, and beneath, faint pencil letters: T— followed by a line, unfinished. Under the sketch she wrote, “the bracelet switch buys a life. Keep accounts.”
I breathe in through my mouth so the sugar smell won’t break me open. “I kept nothing,” I say aloud, angrily, to my own hands. “I filed and smiled and made sure the bell rang at the right times.”
The corridor door thumps as wind shoulders it; the neon buzzes, then steadies. I stack the yellow-tagged books to one side and dig deeper. Beneath the first layer of notebooks sits a cigar tin labeled LEMON MELTAWAYS with heart stickers like a child decorated it to be uninteresting. The weight surprises me. I pop it carefully with my thumbnail and find exactly what Lark promised: a folded NDA with a prepaid card rubber-banded to it and a sheet of names with A/B/O types circled.
“Sweetness buys silence,” I read, but the words crackle different now—less poetry, more indictment. “And silence buys sweetness. Round trip.”
I close the tin and set it behind me out of sight from the corridor. If Vivienne walked in right now, she’d take it, sanitize it, and hand me a receipt with nothing but the word legacy in the memo line. I tuck the tin into my tote and shove a notebook over the tote’s mouth, then stop, guilty at stealing from the dead. “I’m not stealing,” I tell Lark in the concrete. “I’m moving the file to a safer shelf.”
I keep going until my knees ache and my gloves gray with graphite and old sugar. Every book holds a double helix: one strand of confessional verse, one of precision. A boy Lark loved gets three pages of aching metaphor. A donor’s assistant gets AB+ and a drop location behind the marina dumpster with exact time stamps. She writes about Widow’s Teeth like a person you should not taunt, then lists storm profiles by barometric pressure like she’s courting the shoal with data.
At the bottom of the second CANDY box, a notebook with a red elastic slaps my palm. I open it to a title page so solemn it could be an affidavit. “T—Firsts.” Under that, dates and fragments.
first laugh—smelled like caramel on a warm pan
first fever—call B.S.—says it’s teething
first letter—T draws a bell that rings without sound
I press the heel of my hand to my sternum to keep the bell quiet. The initials B.S. burn hotter now—no longer abstraction, not just a line in a ledger. A nurse with a pocket of cash and a number to call. Lark recorded the calls like rosary beads—2 min, 7 min, 3 am, don’t text—then wrapped the page in sticky stars because she couldn’t stop being seventeen even when she was documenting a conspiracy.
“You wanted both,” I say to the red elastic. “A life and a ledger. Music and minutes.”
I check my watch and do Graypoint math: tide in, tide out, traffic on the harbor road. Somewhere across town, the yacht club is icing oysters for another fundraiser; someone will bid on a mentorship the way you bid on a quilt. Somewhere else, off-season fishermen are guarding estates with empty pools and full alarm systems, trading hours for cash and pretending not to see who comes and goes. The town hums with kelp and printer toner, with lemon oil polishing lies to a polite shine.
I stack notebooks in my tote until the strap grunts. I keep back two to leave as misdirection in case anyone opens this locker before I can return—covers visible, the top poem open to a harmless stanza about moons and tides. I write a note to myself on the inside flap of the box: M—took 4—return with gloves—log at 3:10. If I die or get sued, I want a breadcrumb that says I knew what I was doing.
On the lip of the locker, the motel key fob dangles: 17. The number on the diary slip from the envelope whispering a path. Lark left these for me to find—not the way a scavenger hunt flatters you, but the way a drowning person throws a rope. Protecting family means naming the rope and pulling until palms bleed.
I stop before closing the door and skim one more page. It’s glued with tape into a later book, edges browned where caramel splashed and set. Across the top, she wrote “sweetness buys silence,” again, but this time she finished the sentence.
sweetness buys silence; silence buys safety; safety buys time.
time buys a name back.
T keeps hers if I lose mine.
I bite the inside of my cheek. Blood tastes like pennies, like old radiators, like a promise you made at ten and broke at sixteen. I pull the roll-up door down to the knee, then pause, a trickle of April air washing cool across my ankles.
“Last one,” I tell the books. “Then we go.”
A final pocket at the back of the red-elastic notebook holds a thin slip torn from a prescription pad. Lark’s hand rushes like she wrote in a stairwell.
M—if you read this, run the stove and burn sugar.
When the smoke curls, ask the bell a question with no yes.
Do not call V.
Tell T her name fits.
My hands tremble hard enough that the slip snicks against the page. I tuck it into my wallet like cash I’ll never spend. Then I shoulder the tote, breathe the last of the burnt-sugar air, and pull the locker door down until the latch kisses shut.
In the corridor’s buzz, I press my palm to the cool metal and let myself ask the question Lark left coiled in caramel and ink.
“Where is T now,” I whisper, “and who else thinks sweetness still buys her silence?”