“I understand.”
“No, you don’t.” My voice cracked. “If the alarm hadn’t gone off, if I’d slept a little harder, if I’d taken cold medicine or worn earplugs, I could have died.”
Grant’s jaw tightened. “That’s one of the reasons I’m treating this very seriously.”
I wanted to ask who would do this to me, but the question died before it formed. Because even before Grant reached into the folder, even before he said there was something else, some deep and buried instinct inside me had already begun walking toward a name I did not want to say.
“We recovered an item near the suspected point of origin,” he said. “It doesn’t belong in a normal fire pattern, and I need to know whether you recognize it.”
He pulled out a clear evidence bag.
Inside was a half-melted keychain. The metal charm was warped and blackened, but the shape remained visible. A small silver fox, curled as if mid-leap.
The hallway disappeared. The smell, the soot, the ruined walls, all of it receded behind the sudden roar of memory.
I had bought that keychain three years earlier at a little shop in Asheville during a weekend trip I had taken alone after my engagement ended. I had given it to my younger stepbrother, Weston, for his twenty-fourth birthday because he had always joked that foxes were smarter than people gave them credit for. Back then, we had still spoken. Back then, I had still believed he was reckless but harmless. Back then, I had not yet learned how quickly desperation could rot a person from the inside.
“Ms. Myers?” Grant asked.
I could barely breathe. “That belongs to Weston.”
“Who is Weston?”
“My stepbrother,” I said. “Weston Cole. I haven’t seen him in over a year.”
Grant’s pen moved across the clipboard. “Why not?”
Because he had come to my apartment with red eyes and shaking hands, asking for twelve thousand dollars. Because he had said he owed people money, dangerous people, and that if I loved him, I would help. Because I had believed the truth was kinder than enabling him and told him no. Because he had called me selfish, cold, just like my real father, even though my real father had been dead for ten years and had never been anything but gentle with me. Because my mother had taken his side before I finished explaining.
I said only, “He asked me for money. I refused. We haven’t spoken since.”
Grant looked at the evidence bag, then back at me. “Do you know whether he knew where you kept cash, valuables, documents?”
I let out a bitter, startled laugh. “I didn’t keep cash. I barely had savings. My most valuable things were sentimental.”
The moment I said it, grief struck so hard I bent forward slightly, one hand over my mouth. My grandmother’s quilt. My father’s records. The photographs. The wedding album I had pretended not to care about but had carried through three apartments because some younger, softer version of me still lived inside those pages. Sentimental things do not survive fire better because they are priceless only to you.
Grant waited. When I straightened, his voice was gentle but firm.
“I need you to tell me everything you can about Weston Cole.”
Part 3
I told Grant what I knew, and the more I spoke, the more ashamed I felt. Not because Weston’s choices were my fault, but because I had spent so long minimizing them that hearing the truth out loud made me feel like an accomplice to my own blindness. Weston had always needed rescuing. That was the family sentence passed down long before I understood its language. He was my stepfather’s son from a previous marriage, though my stepfather, Ray, had been more shadow than parent, a man who drifted in and out of work, in and out of sobriety, in and out of the house until a heart attack took him when Weston was eighteen. My mother responded to Ray’s death by turning Weston into a permanent emergency.