Chapter 3 · Fire (Megan)

Megan didn’t sleep that night.

She moved the letters to the most unlikely place in the shop—a false bottom in a nineteenth-century sea captain’s chest that had been there since her great-grandfather’s day and never been bought. She photographed every page with her phone and uploaded them to three encrypted cloud services she trusted, each with two-factor authentication.

Only after all that did she dare doze on the small sofa behind the counter.

At 3:17 a.m., she woke choking on smoke.

At first she thought she’d forgotten the coffee pot. But the smell was wrong—turpentine and burnt wood. She opened her eyes and saw, behind the row of old wardrobes at the front of the shop, an orange-red light dancing on the wall.

The fire had started in the back warehouse.

She sprinted for the back door without shoes, and her foot came down on broken glass—someone had smashed the back window. She fumbled for the light switch. It flickered twice and died. The wiring had already burned through.

Smoke flooded her throat. She covered her mouth and stumbled toward the worktable. The sea captain’s chest—the letters were still inside.

“No…”

She lunged, palm hitting the chest, and she recoiled with a cry—it was scalding. The wood was hot enough to make the finish crackle. She ripped an old canvas off the wall, wrapped her hand, dragged the chest off the shelf, and barreled for the front door with it hugged to her chest.

The back door had been barred from outside with an iron rod.

Megan’s heart drummed in her ears. She slammed her shoulder into the front door. The lock rattled—someone was out there. She heard a man’s voice, low through the door:

“Burn it clean. Don’t leave any paper.”

Her breathing stopped.

Just then, a car screeched on the street outside. Then that low, sandpaper voice:

“Come out the side door! I’m counting to three!”

It was the FBI man.

Megan didn’t have time to wonder why he was here. She shouldered into the iron freight door on the side of the shop—the one she usually locked from the inside. The smoke had loosened the latch. She burst through and rolled into the rain.

A hand caught her arm and hauled her up. Reed was soaked through, one hand clamped on her arm, the other holding up his phone: “I called the fire department. Run with me.”

He half-dragged, half-carried her across the street. She looked back—from the back warehouse window, flames were reaching out like living things.

She held the scalding sea captain’s chest against her chest.

The letters were still there.

Reed stared at the chest in her arms, then up at the fire dancing in the rain. Half his face was lit orange by the flames, the other half iron-gray.

“They’re more urgent than I thought,” he said quietly. “Ms. Harper, you can’t go home tonight.”