Jack felt the shift immediately. The workshop seemed to shrink, the hum of electricity receding behind the echo of memory. He didn’t look up, not yet, because he already knew what he would see in her eyes. He had carried that night with him through every case, every empty apartment, every prayer he almost finished but never quite did.
“Annie, you don’t have to—”
“Yes, I do.” She met his eyes directly, and the steadiness in her voice forced him to straighten despite himself. “I need you to know that I didn’t expect anything from you. I wasn’t trying to pressure you or make you uncomfortable. I just… I loved you. And I thought you should know.”
The words didn’t land softly. They never had. They settled into the familiar ache behind his ribs, the one he’d learned to live around, the one he pretended came from old grief rather than unacknowledged fear.
“I did know,” he said finally. “That was the problem.”
He didn’t give himself time to explain, not because he didn’t owe her the truth, but because the truth waited behind too many locked doors, and one fragile piece of antique jewelry already demanded his hands. He bent back over the locket, forcing his focus onto the nearly invisible secondary latch hidden beneaththe etched scrollwork. Victorian craftsmen had excelled at disguising mechanisms, and whoever had made this piece had done so with extraordinary care. The design wasn’t ornamental. It was protective.
“There,” he murmured when the catch finally yielded. “Got it.”
The locket opened with a soft metallic whisper, as though releasing a breath it had been holding for nearly a century. Jack turned it carefully in his palm, studying the contents beneath the magnifying glass. The left chamber held exactly what Annie had glimpsed the night of the break-in—a tiny brass key, ornate enough to suggest it fit something deliberately constructed, not a common lock. But the right side drew his attention immediately.
A scrap of paper, folded until it was no bigger than a postage stamp, lay pressed into the narrow recess. Beneath it, flattened against the gold backing, was a photograph.
“Jack,” Annie whispered. “Is that…?”
He eased the photograph free first, using the tip of the awl so he wouldn’t damage its fragile edges. It was faded but unmistakable. Eleanor Blackwood stood at the center, younger than he had expected, her dark hair swept back from a face that held neither the calm composure of the family portraits nor the softness of a candid moment. Three young men stood close beside her, arms linked with each other, their expressions carrying a tension that made Jack’s instincts sharpen immediately.
“Richard and his friends,” he said. “This must have been taken shortly before Eleanor disappeared.”
“Look at their expressions,” Annie said. “They don’t look like friends. Look at how they’re standing.”
He saw it now that she’d named it—the stiffness, the way Eleanor leaned subtly away from them, the way her smile failedto reach her eyes. This wasn’t camaraderie. It was proximity without consent. Pressure without witnesses.
“What about the paper?” Annie asked.
Jack set the photograph down and unfolded the tiny document with meticulous care. The paper crackled faintly, brittle with age, but the handwriting remained legible.
He read aloud.
“My dearest Thomas…”
The words pulled the air from the room. Eleanor’s voice rose from the page, measured and deliberate, stripped of sentimentality but heavy with foresight.
“She knew,” Annie whispered when he finished. “She knew they were going to kill her.”
“And she documented everything,” Jack said, though the words felt inadequate to the weight of what they held.
A safe-deposit box. A numbered box in a bank that might still exist. Evidence gathered by a woman who had understood, with terrifying clarity, that truth would outlive her only if she concealed it.
Jack folded the letter carefully and replaced it inside the locket along with the photograph and the key, sealing the tiny archive of a life interrupted. “First thing tomorrow,” he said, “we contact First National Bank.”
Annie sank into the wooden chair beside the workbench, her strength visibly ebbing now that adrenaline no longer held her upright. “Richard really did kill her. For money. For an inheritance that wasn’t even his.”
“And someone has been protecting that lie ever since,” Jack said. “Which means this didn’t end with Eleanor. It only went quiet.”
She lifted her eyes to him, and something in their dark reflection twisted sharply in his chest. “Joy would be UncleEric’s grandmother,” she said slowly. “Which means he’s Eleanor’s great-grandson. He’s the rightful heir.”
“No wonder they wanted him dead,” Jack said.
The workshop settled into a heavy silence broken only by the hum of the lights and the distant sound of cattle lowing somewhere beyond the tree line. Jack found himself studying Annie in profile, the same way he used to when they worked late into the night, when she’d lose herself in a theory and forget the world existed beyond the table between them. She had always been this way—drawn toward truth even when it cut, anchored by a quiet courage that didn’t announce itself.
“Annie,” he said softly.
She turned toward him, and the unspoken years pressed forward between them.
