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In Greyhaven, a conservator-turned-investigator discovers a stolen music box that hides a fragment of a map. Following lacquer traces and ledger clues, she uncovers an antiquities ring, compromised officials, and stolen memories. A careful unraveling restores objects—and fractured lives.
The bell above my shop door jangled like a small complaint. Rain had been tracing stripes down the glass all morning, and the light in the lane outside was the color of old pewter. I set the strip of burr I was scraping from an ebony frame into a small dish of solvent and inhaled the acrid tang—turpentine, glue, the faint, impossibly sweet trace left by someone who once handled violets in late summer. Those smells settled into the room the way stories settle: they stuck to corners, hid under the workbench, and made it harder to pretend the past was only a subject on a museum label.
My name is Miriam Hale. I used to spend my days at the Greyhaven Municipal Museum, coaxing flaking paint back into legible faces, lifting centuries of dirt with the patience of someone who speaks to objects. I left two years ago when administration decided conservation could be outsourced to contractors who used heat guns and hurry. I opened this cramped shop on an alley that remembered cobblestones and began taking small commissions: frames, toys, the occasional heirloom box with a lock that did nothing but keep the owner from looking too closely at their own memory.
A knock at the door pulled me out of the bowl of solvent. He arrived like most city men arrive in winter—wrapped in a coat that had seen better years and in a silence that tried to be polite. His eyes were too watchful for a client and too tired for a customer. He set a velvet case on my counter as if it were a sleeping thing.
"It’s a music box," he said. The voice fit him the way an old shirt fits: worn thin at the collar but still serviceable. "My grandmother had it. She used to wind it on Sundays. It’s gone. Someone left me this instead. I thought—whatever you do with things—maybe you’ll know."
The case lifted and the scent of walnut and old lacquer drifted up: a small carved chest, a dancer in enamel, a cylinder of pins. But the carriage of the dancer was wrong; the enamel had a dusting that suggested a different kiln, and a hairline around the keyhole had been polished in a way that made my skin itch. I turned the box over. Inside the lid, under a cracked varnish, was a tiny paper tucked flat as a pressed leaf. On it someone had written three characters in a hand that balanced between haste and ritual.
"You restore this?" he asked. Rain punched the window like a fist.
"I can try," I said, and the word felt like a hinge swinging open. He hesitated, then nodded. "My name is Gareth Lyle," he added. "The museum will say they have it. But I know mine." He left without asking the price, just pushed his wet gloves into his pockets and walked back into the gray.