When the Days Slip

June Morrow found the town by the way the road narrowed and the map gave up its pretence of usefulness. Ashwell had always been small enough that you could mistake familiarity for memory—rows of clapboard houses whose porches had known the same gossip for decades, a single diner that kept its neon sign on even when no one came in, the river that folded itself through the trees like an afterthought. Coming back felt like stepping into a photograph left too long in the sun: the edges frayed, the colors bled away. She let the car idle at the top of Main Street and let the silence settle before she cut the engine. The funeral wasn't until the next morning, but the town gathered the way towns always do; absence was an occupation here.

The church smelled of lilies and old wood. People she had known as a child—neighbors, her father's colleagues from the lumberyard, the teacher who had given June an atlas when she first learned to look beyond town lines—moved around her in small, careful orbits. They spoke haltingly, as if their words had to be negotiated against something else they couldn't quite recall. When she reached for a condolence offered by a neighbor she hadn't seen in years, the woman flinched and looked away, as if June had asked her to reproduce a tune spoken in a language she could no longer hear. It was a sensation that didn't belong to grief alone. It felt like memory misbehaving: a hand that slid through the surface of something and came away with its fingers empty.

Liam Dyer found her at the reception, his expression tight in a way the sheriff's uniform never quite hid. He had the slow, practical face of someone who catalogued problems into lists and refused to let them fester. He put his hand on her shoulder and said, without raising his voice, that the town had been careful—people had reasons to behave like this—and that June should take whatever she needed from the house. "He's left things," Liam said. "Thomas was always the kind who hid his work behind doors."

That night, after voices thinned and the casket had gone to rest elsewhere, June went to her father's house. She walked through rooms thick with the smell of coffee and pipe tobacco, the air of a life unpacked but not yet closed. In the back of the house, past the sunroom with the light-catching glass and the stacks of newspapers her father saved for future crosswords, she found the door he had always kept locked. The brass knob was warm, as if someone had stood there not long ago. She had the key in her pocket, the one she had promised herself she would never use without reason. She put her hand on the knob and turned it.