Page 31 of Bear and Order

I continue reading. Names from earlier in the investigation reappear, threaded through wholesale accounts, canceled orders, complaint filings, and shipping records across multiple months. Everything keeps circling back to the same cluster of businesses, and the picture it paints is not a comfortable one. This isn't a coincidence. The evidence is connecting in ways that send a chill straight through me, because every answer we find seems to open onto a worse question.

I look up. "Brock."

His gaze meets mine. "I see it."

"Yeah."

Neither of us sounds particularly pleased about that. I return to the records and search for another explanation, a better one, something that disrupts the pattern rather than confirms it. The paperwork refuses to cooperate. The pattern holds — clear, uncomfortable, and growing harder to argue against with every page I turn.

The library stays quiet around us. Brock makes notes in the margin of a report. I cross-reference two invoices and find another overlap I wasn't expecting. We work in silence, the kind that carries its own weight, and somewhere inside it a thought takes shape that I don't particularly want to have.

Brock voiced his concerns about Marissa. The records are sitting just beside me.

I glance up at him without meaning to. He's already watching, in that measured way he has — not accusatory, not satisfied, just present. Waiting to see what I do with what I'm looking at.

"It doesn't mean anything yet," I say, more to myself than to him.

"No," he agrees. "Not yet."

The qualification lands carefully, and I appreciate that he doesn't push further. He just returns to his notes and lets me sit with it, which is somehow both considerate and deeply inconvenient, because it leaves me no argument to hide behind.

Doubt settles into my thoughts, quiet and uninvited. Small enough to dismiss, persistent enough to stay. I hate it the moment I feel it, and hating it does absolutely nothing to make it disappear.

This is the same Marissa that brought me food, squeezed my hand, called me June, I smiled back, and none of that has changed. But the records are still by my side. The pattern is still there. And the two things are beginning to feel less unrelated than I need them to be.

BROCK

The bakery is officially closed — at least according to the sign hanging on the front door. Juniper, however, seems completely unaware of that fact. She moves between tables carrying trays and wiping surfaces while I sit at a corner table with investigation files spread around me. The display cases are empty, the lights dimmed, the last customer long gone. Yet somehow she's still working.

I glance up from a complaint report. "Do you ever stop?"

Juniper looks over her shoulder. "Do you?"

I return my attention to the paperwork. A moment later something catches my eye — a magazine sitting beneath a stack of invoices near the edge of the counter. Travel destinations, mountain ranges, foreign cities, ocean photographs. The cover looks worn from repeated use.

I pick it up. Juniper notices immediately.