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I stare at the screen, irritation blooming in my gut. The case has been quiet for years. Quiet was survivable.

I lock my phone and drop it into the side compartment of my door.

Tamsin returns, arms full.

She opens the passenger door and begins unloading items onto her lap. A family sized bag of salt and vinegar chips. Gummy worms. Trail mix with an alarming amount of chocolate. A bottled smoothie that’s so green it looks radioactive.

She hands me a pack of cookies.

“What’s this?” I ask.

“Emergency biscuits,” she shakes the package in front of my face until I take it. “Because I know you’re not actually going to eat that crusty protein bar.” She wrinkles her nose. “And for morale.”

“I wasn’t aware the morale was compromised.”

“You’re driving toward your past,” she deadpans. “Morale is in grave peril.”

She opens the chips and eats one with visible satisfaction as I merge back onto the highway.

“What happened?” The way she reads me is actually concerning at times.

“The internet is wrong again.”

She nods. “Typical.”

I tear open the pack with my teeth and shove one into my mouth. It’s crunchy and sweet and absolutely not a biscuit by any definition I recognize.

I glance over at Tamsin. “Biscuits are soft. They come with gravy.”

“That sounds profoundly upsetting,” she replies calmly.

I take another bite.

She offers me the gummy worms next. Then the trail mix. “You’re allowed to be annoyed, but you’re not allowed to spiral until after we eat all the snacks.”

I glance at her, and my bad mood eases a little. She gives me a faint, victorious smile.

Despite our commitment to making each other’s lives incrementally more difficult, she has always had a talent for making the genuinely difficult parts feel temporarily manageable.

Stillwater Inn announces itself with a hand-painted sign, the lettering faded just enough that older strokes of paint show faintly beneath the newest layer.

It looks less like a hotel and more like a large house that decided to monetize itself—lace curtains drawn across tall windows, a brass doorbell instead of an automatic door, and a chalkboard by the entrance welcoming guests back in looping handwriting that has started to smudge at the edges.

The porch boards creak when we step onto them. One of the upstairs windows shifts slightly in the wind, the glass tapping against the frame in a slow, uneven rhythm. The whole place has the stagnant, preserved feeling the town seems to prefer.

“This place is definitely haunted,” Tamsin says, approving.

The front desk is an actual desk, the kind a teacher might sit behind—which is fitting, considering the woman behind it used to substitute for half my middle school classes. Marjorie is the permanent fixture of the Stillwater Inn, a woman who looks older than the building itself, yet somehow considerably more alert than either of us.

Marj has known me since I was a spindly ten-year-old trying to excavate the inn’s gravel driveway for stone points. She’s the one who looked the other way when my friends and I were up to no good, and the one who always seemed to have a peppermint or a piece of unsolicited advice tucked into her pocket. Sometimes both.

She recognizes me immediately, her gaze settling on me with the unmistakable interest of someone who has been waiting for news.

“Well,” she peers at me over her glasses, “you’re back for it. Knew you would be.”

I give her a flat look.

“The case,” she adds, delighted. “Everyone is.”