MAFIA BOSS STOOD ALONE AT HIS HALLOWEEN PARTY WHEN AN EXHAUSTED DECORATOR LEANED CLOSE AND WHISPERED "TRICK OR TREAT"—BUT HIS REPLY, "YOU'RE THE ONLY TREAT I WANT," LEFT HER SPEECHLESS BEFORE SHE EVEN KNEW WHO HE WAS.

The next day, Sabrina discovered that a security detail was a poor substitute for being asked.

Two men stood outside the studio when she arrived with Josie. Neither wore a uniform. One held a coffee he appeared to have forgotten to drink. The other was inspecting a parked car with the intensity of a man looking for a reason to dismantle it.

Sabrina stopped on the sidewalk. “Absolutely not.”

Josie glanced at the men. “They haven't said anything.”

“They don't have to. Their entire hobby is saying nothing while making people nervous.”

She crossed to the taller one. “Who sent you?”

“Mr. Duca requested that we remain nearby.”

“Then tell Mr. Duca my front door isn't an extension of his property.”

The man shifted, uncomfortable. “Miss Cole, we're just here for safety.”

“Safety is a conversation. This is surveillance with a coffee cup.”

She called Adrien before she could reconsider. He picked up immediately.

“Your men are outside my studio.”

“I had them assigned after the break-in.”

“You didn't ask.”

“I didn't want another intrusion.”

“Neither do I. But I decide who stands outside my door.”

He said nothing for a moment. She could hear traffic through his end of the call.

“You're right,” he said at last. “I'll have them leave.”

“Now.”

They were gone in six minutes.

Josie watched their black SUV pull away and exhaled. “That went better than I expected.”

“It shouldn't have required a performance.”

“No. But I'm glad you kept the profanity to a professional minimum.”

Inside the studio, repair crews were replacing the lock. The police had cleared the space for work, and the mess looked less sinister in daylight. Sabrina knew she had to keep paying people and finishing other clients' orders no matter what happened with the Playhouse.

She called her three part-time assistants, explained only what was necessary, and offered each the choice to work remotely until things settled. Miles opted to stay. Candace, who made floral installations, took her supplies home. A college student named Rory asked if the break-in meant the company was closing.

“No,” Sabrina said. “It means somebody has terrible taste in theft.”

The joke worked just enough. Rory laughed. Then he went back to sanding a prop door for a school production.

Before the lawyer arrived, an elderly neighbor from the hardware store across the street carried over a box of replacement screws. He had watched the police work through the previous night and recognized enough of Walter's old stage frames to understand what had been damaged.

“Your grandfather fixed my front steps without sending an invoice,” he told Sabrina. “These are from that same old stock. Thought you might need them.”

Sabrina accepted the box and tried to thank him without letting her voice break.

“You're not responsible for fixing this,” she said.

“Neither was Walter responsible for half the things he fixed,” the neighbor answered. “Didn't seem to stop him.”

After he left, she set the screws on the bench and looked around the battered studio. The business was not a fortress, and she could not make it one by willpower. But it was connected to people who cared whether it survived. That was an advantage the men breaking into it seemed unable to calculate.

At noon, Adrien's lawyer arrived.

Her name was Beatrice Lane, and she was not his lawyer at all.

She had represented tenants displaced by commercial redevelopment and had spent more than ten years filing public-records requests against Duca Holdings. She wore comfortable shoes, carried a canvas briefcase covered with old campaign buttons, and greeted Adrien like a man she might still sue before dessert.

“Your name appeared on a document I dislike,” she told him without preamble.

“It often does.”

“This time I'd prefer to understand why.”

They met in an independent conference room above a community bookstore. Sabrina had insisted on a place with ordinary traffic and a receptionist who knew who was coming and going.

Beatrice examined Walter's plans and the photographs. Her expression grew tighter with each page.

“There were complaints,” she said. “After the fire. Families claimed the exit was blocked before any renovation notice existed. But the city's final report described the north passage as a non-egress storage alcove.”

“That's impossible,” Sabrina said. “Walter put an illuminated EXIT above it.”

Beatrice tapped the second plan. “Someone redrew history with a ruler.”

“What happened to the families?” Adrien asked.

“Small settlements. Confidential agreements. Some signed because they needed hospital bills paid. The others were told the building's records had been destroyed.”

Sabrina pictured Walter fixing a toy coffin in his living room while, years earlier, adults had been telling grieving parents that a door never existed. The thought made her teeth hurt.

“Did he testify?” she asked.

“Walter gave a preliminary statement,” Beatrice said. “It was never entered at trial because there was no trial. The city investigators accepted the electrical fault explanation and the civil claims settled.”

“Why wouldn't Walter speak publicly?”

“I don't know. We can look at what survives.”

She turned to Adrien. “What concerns me is the holding-company deed. You signed a certification that the 1999 redevelopment covenants were valid and complete.”

“I relied on outside counsel.”

“Which is not a magic eraser.”

“I know.”

“Good. Because if you're going to help, you don't get to help only with the pieces that leave your name clean.”

Sabrina watched him absorb that. He did not argue. She remembered his answer to a similar point in the hotel and wondered whether acceptance was easy for him because he had no choice—or because he was trying, however imperfectly, to be different.

Beatrice proposed three separate tasks. She would petition for preservation of the surviving Playhouse wing. A forensic document examiner would compare the altered plans. Sabrina would inventory every old flat and prop from Walter's collection without dismantling anything further until photographs were taken. Adrien would produce the full chain of ownership, including any side agreements his uncle handled.

“I'm not your detective,” Sabrina said.

“No,” Beatrice replied. “You're the person who knows which boards are original.”

Sabrina considered that, then nodded. A skill she had learned making imaginary places believable had become essential to exposing a real place made false.

After the meeting, Adrien asked whether she would walk with him to the riverfront. Josie raised both eyebrows, then volunteered to return to the studio with the boxes.

“You owe me lunch,” Josie whispered as she left.

Sabrina and Adrien walked beneath a line of bare trees. The afternoon was cold enough that their breath showed in brief clouds.

“I apologize for sending the security men,” he said.

“You already did by removing them.”

“I wanted to say it directly.”

She looked sideways at him. “Are you always this formal?”

“Usually more.”

“Terrifying.”

He smiled, then grew serious. “Someone sent those threats to you because I pulled you into a problem that belonged to my family.”

“My grandfather is part of it too.”

“That doesn't excuse me.”

“No,” she agreed. “It doesn't.”

They stopped beside the railing. Barges moved slowly on the gray river. Adrien told her about the months after his mother's death: his father locking away every photograph, the family advising silence, the fourteen-year-old boy learning that grief was an embarrassing subject among men who preferred revenge. By eighteen he had inherited an office full of people who said yes to everything. By twenty-five he no longer knew whether a yes meant agreement or survival.

“And now?” Sabrina asked.

“Now I pay people to tell me when I'm wrong.”

“Do they?”

“Not as often as I deserve.”

She laughed. He looked pleased to have earned it.

Then her phone rang.

Miles.

“Sab, are you at the studio?”

“No. What's wrong?”

“I found something in the maze panels we brought back.” His voice shook. “There's a hidden compartment in the old third frame. I didn't open it. I thought maybe—”

He broke off.

In the background came a crash, followed by a man's shout.

“Miles?” Sabrina said. “Miles!”

The line stayed connected long enough for her to hear hurried footsteps and a dull thud.

Then silence.

Adrien had already taken out his phone.

“What happened?”

“Someone's at the studio,” Sabrina said. “Miles is there alone.”

He did not tell her to calm down. He called emergency services and gave the address while she called Detective Price. They drove separately, Sabrina in a taxi because she refused to let one of his men become her only possible exit.

When they arrived, patrol cars blocked the street.

Miles sat on the curb under a blanket, shaken but conscious. Someone had struck him as he photographed the compartment. The intruder fled when the neighboring locksmith opened his back door and shouted.

Sabrina knelt beside Miles. “What did they take?”

“Nothing,” he whispered. “I hid the packet before he got to me.”

“Where?”

Miles swallowed. “Inside the old stage coffin. The one you made for the school fundraiser.”

She looked across the studio toward the scratched plywood coffin that Walter had built twenty years ago and never managed to throw away.

An absurdly ordinary hiding place.

One more way Walter's imagination had survived long enough to defend the truth.

The police retrieved the packet while everyone watched. It contained one photographic negative, folded notes in a woman's handwriting, and a brass key stamped 14.

Adrien stared at the handwriting.

“That's my mother's,” he said.

The photograph held up to the light showed the north service door on the night of the fire.

A chain crossed its handles.

Beside it stood a man with his hand raised toward a maintenance worker.