My mother’s name didn’t start with R.But Charlie’s wife’s did.
I sank slowly onto the nearest stool, both papers spread across my lap, the weight of them crushing.They shouldn’t be together—not in the same book, not bound by the same ash.Unless the stories I’d grown up believing didn’t line up the way I thought.
Unless the stories overlapped.
I stared at the burned loops of my father’s handwriting, at the graceful R scrawled across the second note, and felt the room tilt.
The library no longer smelled of dust and pine.It smelled of smoke—phantom smoke, rising up from the jagged edges of the past.
Charlie knew.He had to.
And for the first time since I’d stepped into his house, I wasn’t sure if the warmth I felt for him was a light leading me closer, or a flame about to burn me down.
I almost closed the book, heart pounding too fast, but something caught at the corner of the binding—thicker than paper, wedged deep.
With trembling fingers, I tugged it free.A scrap of photo corner, brittle and yellowed, fluttered into my palm.Nothing more than the edge of a picture, but still damning in its survival.Beneath it, on the flyleaf, pencil marks pressed faint and jagged, as if written in haste.
My father’s hand again.
Debt’s paid.Don’t ask.
The words punched the breath out of me.Debt?To whom?For what?
My hands shook as I turned another brittle page.
And then—another line, half-burned, written on the back leaf as though it had been scribbled in the final moment before closing the book.
Fragment #3
If anything happens, tell Belle I did one decent thing.Don’t let her know… [burn]
—J.
I read it once.Twice.A third time.
The ash had swallowed the rest.Don’t let her know…what?
My chest constricted so tightly it hurt.
What debt?What decent thing?Why would my father—my flawed, complicated, impossible father—leave this for Charlie to guard?
It felt like standing at the edge of a cliff, the fog thick below me, knowing there was a story buried in that haze, one that could explain everything—why Charlie looked at me the way he did, why the town whispered, why my father’s name lived like a ghost inside these walls.
But the fire had eaten the answers.
And now the questions sat heavy in my palms, burned into my skin as surely as if I’d touched the flame myself.
I spread the scraps out across the desk, smoothing them flat with shaking hands.They looked pitiful, blackened at the edges, the words cut short mid-breath—but together, they formed something close to a picture.
The first letter: my father to Archer.Charlie.Lines about leaving before the road closed.About “she” asking questions.
The second: R.’s elegant hand, begging not to pretend anymore, promising they could be gone by dawn if they just didn’t look back.
And now the third:Debt’s paid.Don’t ask.Followed by that final, seared fragment:Tell Belle I did one decent thing.Don’t let her know…
I lined them in order, side by side, as if they might admit what they’d been hiding all these years.And slowly, horribly, a shape began to emerge.
My father and R.—Charlie’s wife—together.Running.
