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He smiles, but I see the moment his gaze catches his own fading wrist. I cover his hand with mine.

“You’re helping,” I say before he can make a joke sharp enough to cut himself. His eyes lift. “You’re not a problem sitting beside my research. You’re my co-investigator with some transparency issues.”

His smile returns slowly. “That title is too long for a business card.”

“We’ll workshop it.”

He turns his hand under mine and squeezes.

“Do you ever worry,” I ask, because the question has been pressing against my throat all morning, “that if I cannot explain this, I won’t know where I belong in it?”

Ezra’s expression gentles. “No. I worry that if you explain everything, you’ll decide you’re done with us because the puzzle is solved.”

My throat tightens. “That’s not how I work.”

“Good. Me neither.” He taps the photo of the stone. “Then maybe belonging is less like an answer and more like a place you keep returning to.”

Outside, Theo drills a bracket into the porch beam.

I look at Ezra, at Darwin, at my mother’s tea, at the route stone waiting on the table like a secret with roots. “Now who’s being poetic?”

“I do occasionally create art.”

Theo comes in twenty minutes later, rain damp across his shoulders. “East camera is up. Dock camera too. Roman is configuring the feed for me.”

“Did you point anything at raccoons?”

“One raccoon. He was very suspicious-looking.”

Ezra nods gravely. “They are highly dangerous creatures.”

Theo’s gaze drops to our tracing paper. “Find anything?”

I turn the overlay toward him. “The original stone placement points the open symbol toward moving water. The Love Stone scan looks like a closed version of the same language. I think one held. One opened.”

His face tightens at the word opened, but he doesn’t shut down. He comes behind my chair and bends to kiss the top of my head. Then he does the same to Ezra, pressing his mouth briefly to his hair. “You both did good.”

The praise warms me more than the tea.

Roman appears at the kitchen door. “The east feed is live. Also, the chain you had me cover looks wrong.”

Theo tenses.

We go to the fence together. The rain has thinned to mist, and the cemetery smells of wet grass, limestone, and crushed leaves. The chain across the east access hangs where Theo left it, but one link has been cut and hooked back together to look whole from the road.

Beside it, caught against the metal, is a strip of bright white cloth tied too tightly to flutter.

I crouch with gloves on while Theo stands close enough that his heat brushes my back. Ezra stays by the shallow channel where moving water keeps his edges firm. The cloth smells faintly sweet even through the rain.

“It’s modern,” I say. “Same pattern as the one Scarlet sent pictures of from Larkspur.”

Wes holds open an evidence bag. I drop the cloth inside.

The old route materials opened toward water, but this one was tied to hold. I look down the east road, where tire tracks vanish into cypress shadow and rainwater gathers in the ruts like dark glass.

“Someone copied the old language,” I say, sealing the bag with shaking fingers. “And changed the purpose.”

Theo’s hand opens beside mine. I take it because even though I’m afraid, I believe him when he says he’ll keep me safe.