Page 123

“I brought in every record I know how to find.” I keep my hands at my sides. “Property records, old surveys, maintenance notes, paper plot cards, sale photos, previous caretaker stuff. Current records are digitized. Older charity section records have gaps.”

Ezra’s foot tightens around my ankle under the table.

“I knew about the gaps,” I say. “I didn’t know they were dangerous.”

Pepper comes closer and places her hand over mine for one brief squeeze. “Now we do.”

Then she turns to the boxes, and the room fills with her excitement. “Let’s start by trying to answer one question: what used to connect the charity graves to the old water route?”

She works as though curiosity is a battery wired straight into her bones. She stares at the piles for a moment and I can almost hear the gears turning as she formulates a plan. She’s barefoot, in a messy bun and my shirt with a pencil tucked behind her ear. I’ve never seen a woman more beautiful.

She’s making piles before I finish explaining the first box. The current maps are by the sink. Old photos near Ezra. Flood year anything by her tea. Flowers in their own stack because, as Pepper puts it, “Sweetheart Haven has lost the privilege of treating flowers like background décor.”

The more she talks, the more Ezra wakes.

He leans over photos and catches details I would miss. A fence line moved. A tree was younger in this one, or a shadow cuts wrong across a marker. Pepper paces behind my chair, thinking aloud, and Ezra follows her as if her thoughts are a trail of light across paper.

I sit where they put me and watch them come alive together.

Luck is too small a word for this. I come from angry men who took what they wanted and called it fair. I learned to be useful by being hard. Then I hid us away from that life and bought a house beside graves because the dead asked less of me than the living.

This morning, Pepper is in my kitchen wearing my shirt, Ezra has color in his face, and they’re arguing over whether a flower can be a filing system. I’ve never before wanted the chance at living as much as in this moment. I want every ordinary hour they’ll let me have.

Pepper opens her notebook. “We have an undocumented grave with a swamp lily and a route mark, a missing cemetery ledger, and Jessamine telling us not to separate the open curve from moving water. So I want to know what the lily was identifying and whether this grave was once part of a release route. We know Scarlet’s grandmother separated protection points from release routes. She kept saying the town mistook one for the other.”

Ezra nods. “One held. One released.”

“Right.” Pepper taps her pencil against her lip. “And the modern bundles copied older flowers and thread, but somebody contaminated them and used them differently.”

She looks at the grave photo. “So I want to separate the original system from the corrupted one. What did the swamp lily mean before someone started using these materials to hold people instead of release them?”

Ezra studies the photo. “Maybe it wasn’t part of the ritual itself.”

Pepper points at him. “What if it identified the location?”

“Like a label,” Ezra says.

Pepper points at him. “Exactly. A botanical label tied to a route or burial site.”

“Flowers can be labels,” Ezra says. “In art. In cemeteries. And in dramatic small towns.”

“Yes!” She turns toward the plot card box. “If it was cemetery paperwork, Theo would have it with plot records. If it was a plant label, Heritage Hall might have it. Maybe it’s in the festival files?”

“That’s a ridiculous place for plant records,” Ezra says.

Pepper climbs into my lap as if I’m part of the chair and keeps looking at the photo in her hand. My body goes blessedly quiet under her, tension draining as I fill my lungs with her scent.

“Ridiculous is not disqualifying in Sweetheart Haven.”

Ezra lifts his coffee. “Put it on the brochure.”

I settle one hand at Pepper’s hip. She leans back into me without pausing her thinking.

She talks with her whole body, pencil flashing, bare foot tapping against my chair leg as she asks herself questions and she and Ezra try to answer them. When she gets excited, her scent shifts. Peppermint brightens through rosemary. Vanilla warms. Fear loses ground inch by inch.

Ezra becomes bright and lively inside her curiosity. I do too, but Ezra becomes devastatingly handsome. His eyes sharpen. His mouth softens. His fingers quit checking the water bowl every few minutes because he’s too busy arguing over angles and labels with the omega who refuses to let the world stay unexplained.

I reach into the flat case and take out the notebook I found in the caretaker supplies.