My house burned on a Tuesday. Nothing was stolen. Everything was destroyed — which, as it turns out, is much worse.
Four days later I found a man in a leather cut going through my museum’s archives, and we recognized the same 1821 number at the same moment.
I don’t like him. I like talking to him, which I find irritating and have filed as a separate issue.
He’s got a dying uncle in a hospice bed, a family debt he refused at twenty-three, and a Louisiana drawl he’s spent fifteen years trying to lose.
I’ve got a ledger, a boiler I can’t afford, and a name on page one hundred and forty-one that ruins everything.
Somewhere out in Barataria Bay there’s a book that three old families have paid to keep buried since before my great-grandmother was born.
They’ll pay anything to keep it there.
But how much is a man worth who’s finally decided to stop being paid?
