"GOD, PLEASE SEND MAMA A GOOD MAN WHO WILL NEVER LEAVE US," A SIX-YEAR-OLD GIRL PRAYED—BUT THE MAFIA BOSS BEHIND HER WENT PALE WHEN HE SAW HER DEAD FATHER'S POCKET WATCH!

For one frozen second I could only think about Lucy's shoes.

She had two pairs. Her good shoes were on her feet, the little black ones with buckles she polished with a washcloth. Her sneakers were under the bed in our boarding-house room, beside the folded picture she'd made for Daniel's birthday before either of us understood he wouldn't have another one.

"What kind of fire?" I demanded.

Ezra checked his phone. "Alarm reported. Fire trucks dispatched. No confirmed smoke yet."

"How do you know where we live?"

He looked at Caleb. Caleb looked at him.

"Ezra," Caleb said, very quietly.

"I ran a protective background check after we identified Mrs. Harper," Ezra admitted. "I meant to tell you. The notification came from a private security feed."

I stared at them both. "You investigated me without asking?"

"Yes," Ezra said. "And I'm sorry."

The fact that he admitted it didn't make me less furious. But Lucy was watching my face, and that was enough to get me moving.

"I need to get there."

"I'll drive you," Caleb said.

"I'm not getting into a stranger's car."

"Then we'll call a taxi and follow behind. Your decision."

I looked at Reverend Bell. He nodded toward the church's aging minivan parked outside. "I'll drive."

So that was how I left the service: with my daughter holding a paper cup of church lemonade, our pastor at the wheel, and a black sedan following at a careful distance.

When we turned onto Gulfview Lane, two fire trucks blocked the narrow street. A knot of tenants stood beneath a jacaranda tree, some barefoot, some holding pets wrapped in towels. Smoke wasn't rising from the house. That should have comforted me. Instead, I noticed a police cruiser and Mrs. Phelps, the landlady, arguing with an officer beside the front steps.

"My things," I whispered.

I jumped out before Reverend Bell had fully stopped.

"Ma'am, stay behind the line," a firefighter said.

"My daughter and I live upstairs."

"No active fire. We had a pulled alarm and someone reported a chemical odor. We're checking the rooms."

Mrs. Phelps caught my arm. "Eliza, somebody was in your room."

The street tilted.

"What?"

"I went up after the alarm. Your door was open. I know I locked the side entrance last night."

I looked back toward the minivan. Lucy sat safely beside Reverend Bell, waving at a golden retriever in another tenant's arms. I wanted to pull her against me and keep her there until she turned thirty.

A firefighter escorted me up after the building was cleared. Our door stood ajar. The hallway smelled of stale carpet and the lemon cleaner Mrs. Phelps used to hide the damp.

Inside, someone had emptied our suitcase onto the bed.

Lucy's pajamas. My two work blouses. Daniel's blue sweater. Socks scattered across the floor.

The little box of photographs from our old house lay overturned. A glass frame had broken, and Daniel's face smiled through a spiderweb of cracks.

But they hadn't taken the laptop, because I didn't own one. They hadn't taken my purse, because it was with me.

I went straight to the loose floorboard beneath the window, where I'd hidden Daniel's tax records in a mailing envelope. The envelope was still there. Its contents were not.

"What was in it?" asked the officer who'd followed me.

"Personal papers." My voice sounded distant. "Tax statements. Receipts."

He took notes. "Any idea who'd want them?"

I thought about Caleb's office, about Victor Sloane, about Daniel checking the locks. "Maybe."

I should have told the officer everything right there. But fear doesn't follow the clean lines of a courtroom argument. I had a child downstairs. I had no lawyer. Three months earlier, an officer had called Daniel's death an accident and told me grief was making me suspicious. I didn't trust myself to withstand another dismissal.

"I'll bring a full statement," I said.

When we came down, Caleb was waiting at the edge of the crowd, keeping a respectful distance. His face hardened when he saw my expression.

"They're gone," I said. "Daniel's papers are gone."

He did not ask whether I was certain. "What kind of papers?"

"Bank records. Insurance documents. Some of his client invoices. I hadn't looked closely. I couldn't." I swallowed. "Every time I tried to sort through his things, it felt like putting him away."

"You don't have to explain grief to me."

"Don't tell me what I have to do."

"All right."

That simple surrender made me angrier for reasons I couldn't name.

Mrs. Phelps approached carrying an envelope. "Eliza, I was going to leave this under your door. It came by courier yesterday."

The letterhead belonged to a property-management company I'd never heard of. Our room had been declared unsafe for continued occupancy pending inspection. The notice said our temporary lodging arrangement would end that evening.

"This isn't your company," I told Mrs. Phelps.

"Somebody bought the house last month. I only manage it now. I'm as surprised as you are."

Caleb reached toward the paper, then stopped. "May I?"

I handed it over.

He read the signature at the bottom and went motionless. "Ezra."

Ezra looked. "Gulf Asset Recovery. Victor's brother-in-law owns a piece of that firm."

Suddenly I understood why the watch mattered. Why the room mattered. Why an unimportant widow with sixty-three dollars mattered.

I had taken something out of Daniel's life without even knowing I had it, and someone wanted to make sure I didn't have time to discover what it was.

"We need a lawyer," I said.

"I know one," Caleb replied. "Miriam West. Independent practice. She doesn't work for me, and she likes telling me when I'm wrong."

"That sounds useful."

"You have no idea."

By four that afternoon, Miriam West had met us in Reverend Bell's office. She was a woman in her fifties with silver-framed glasses, a linen jacket, and the controlled impatience of somebody who understood that politeness could be used as a weapon.

She asked to speak with me without Caleb present. I liked her immediately.

"Mr. Mercer has offered you a house," she said. "You do not have to take it. He also offered to fund temporary lodging and legal representation. You do not have to accept either. If you do, I want the terms on paper."

"Why would he do any of this?"

"You'll have to ask him. I can tell you why I agreed to meet you. A man died. His widow is being displaced. His records have been stolen. Somebody ought to care whether those facts are connected."

We arranged a small guest cottage belonging to the church's retired organist, not a Mercer property. Caleb agreed to pay its weekly rent into a fund administered by Miriam, which I could repay if I chose. There would be no guard stationed at my door without my consent. A patrol car could check the street, and Reverend Bell would have a key.

It was the first arrangement anyone had made for me in months that didn't leave me feeling smaller.

That night, Lucy fell asleep on a clean yellow quilt with her stuffed rabbit tucked under one elbow. The cottage smelled of old books and lavender soap. Crickets chirped outside the screened window. I sat at the kitchen table, finally alone with my husband's watch.

The little second hand had stopped at seventeen minutes past nine.

It had been running that morning. I wound it once. Nothing happened. Then I turned it over, examining the scratches, the engraved initials E.M. on the back, and the seam around the hinged case.

Daniel used to open it to wind the mechanism, but he had once warned Lucy never to pry at the inner cover. "It's old," he'd said. "Some old things need gentler hands."

I pressed the release catch with my thumbnail. The front opened. Behind the silver dial was another thin metal cover, held by a tiny screw.

I didn't own a screwdriver small enough. I found a sewing kit in the cottage drawer and used the point of a needle instead.

The screw turned.

The cover lifted.

Inside, folded so small I almost mistook it for packing tissue, was a sliver of paper.

My hands shook as I unfolded it.

Daniel's handwriting. I would have known it anywhere: the crooked capital D, the way he crossed his sevens.

Four words had been written beneath a date.

"Ask about the empty beds."

Below them was one more line.

"Caleb knows the first half."

I read the words three times. What beds? Hospital beds? Shelter beds? Why had Daniel written his message inside a watch another man had given him?

My phone vibrated with a number I didn't recognize.

For one terrible second, I thought it might be Daniel. Grief makes a person believe impossible things in the space between one heartbeat and the next.

I answered.

A woman spoke before I could say hello.

"Mrs. Harper? My name is Nadia Vega. I'm a detective with the state investigative bureau. Your husband tried to reach me the night he died. I was told you'd left Florida."

I gripped the phone. "We never left."

"I understand that now." She paused. "I'm calling because someone requested that his crash evidence be destroyed tomorrow morning."

Outside, headlights washed briefly across the cottage curtains.