Mara Ellison parked on the narrow street and let the engine tick for a while, as if the old car might talk her out of it. She had rehearsed the moment for years in increments — a headline half-remembered, a courthouse smell that belonged to another life, a hand she never quite dared to clasp. The property had been hers on paper for weeks: a handful of legal forms unsigned by grief, a key left in a drawer by an executor who had treated the transfer as routine. Returning to the town where she had spent her first nineteen summers felt smaller in the light of the late afternoon, the façades of shops folded into shadows, the square quieting. Everything was neat, as if someone had swept the corners of memory with a broom meant to catch dust and not people.
She ran a hand along the wheel and felt the tremor that never left her when she was this close to what she had fled. She had not come back to be sentimental. The reason had been promised in small, stubborn steps: a list of names she had kept in the margins of notebooks, a half-finished story she had never printed for fear of reopening things that refused to stay closed. Nora Reed’s name sat on top. Nora's grin had been photos and fragments, a laugh that lived in the angles of Mara’s mind. There were questions Mara could not let go of — questions that had outlived the people who once could have answered them.
The house sat farther up the lane than she remembered, two stories of faded clapboard and an unruly garden that had learned to live without being tended. A porch sagged where an oak’s roots had settled against the foundation. A brass plate by the door had her surname still attached but dulled by weather. At the base of the steps, half-hidden by a coil of old hose, a small rusted tin lay on its side like the fossil of some domestic accident. It had not been there an hour before; no joggers had passed, no children’s voices drifted like a town soundtrack. The tin was the kind people used to keep buttons and screws, rounded with a faded floral pattern on the lid. When Mara picked it up it was heavier than its size suggested.
The lid yielded with a thin papery sound. Inside, among a few brittle receipts and a stray hairpin, lay a photograph folded at the corner and a small pin the color of dull brass. The image was older than she was used to finding in boxes — a festival, people doubled over laughter, ribbons in hair, a banner across the background declaring a summer fair. The center had been deliberately marred: a face excised with jagged lines, a ghost where a person should have stood. The brass pin bore letters she squinted to read: Municipal Service. The two objects looked at her together like an accusation.