Chapter 16
The first thing I'm aware of is my throat.
The second thing is that the other side of the bed is empty, and the specific quality of the quiet in my home tells me it's been empty for a while.
I reach for my phone and knock it off the nightstand, knowing it will take effort to get it because I'm lying flat and my body is filing a formal grievance about last night. But I manage to do it.
There's a note that wasn't there when I fell asleep, tented, my name on the outside.
Had to a meeting. I'll be at the bookstore by nine. I love you.
His first "I love you" landed last night with his hands around me, both of us still wrecked from the hospital, the smoke, and a night that could have gone another way.
My throat was raw, words scraping, so I hadn't tried to match him.
I kissed him instead. It felt right. Less performance and more proof.
Still, he wrote it down and that’s different.
I set the note on the nightstand and take stock. The harbor wind pushes against the windows and I feel the specific ache in my throat that the doctor said would be gone in two days.
I can’t get the back room floor out of my head, or the smell of burnt paper that I’m still not entirely convinced isn’t trapped in my hair.
I hadn’t been afraid, or I hadn’t been conscious long enough to be afraid, which is its own specific kind of terror to sit with in the daylight.
By the time the light outside has any real color in it, I’ve made coffee I can barely swallow and written six pages. None of it is Lara Vaine.
It’s just me thinking about Shane’s easy smile, and how I handed him full access to my store and my schedule because he seemed trustworthy.
There’s a suffocating kind of knowledge in realizing trust can be engineered as precisely as a fire exit override.
I look at what I’ve written and close the notebook. None of it can be used for my current book. Lara Vaine gets the version where the protagonist sees it coming.
I put the pen down, grab my things, and have my key in the lock of the bookstore before Callum's text arrives at 8:15 asking if I'm already there.
Me: Obviously.
He arrives in less than ten minutes and crosses the threshold, scanning without turning it into a show. He moves through the front, then the side aisle, then the corridor to the back, checking angles and exits and the panel housing like it’s muscle memory he’s not interested in explaining.
Pancake slips in after him like she’s been doing this her whole life, trotting straight to the rug by the front display and turning once before settling into the exact same spot she claimed back when the rug was in the pop-up space.
Apparently, changing buildings doesn’t affect her jurisdiction, and I don’t question it.
I follow him a few steps in, then stop by the front shelves.
The room looks almost back to normal. Clear pathways from front to back and all displays are ready.
But there’s a faint edge to the air that wasn’t here before.
I pull a paperback from the nearest stack and crack it open slightly, checking the pages.
He comes back to the front as I lift it closer to my face. "Avery, are you smell-testing the inventory?"
"I’m not huffing paperback fumes for fun," I say, and take a careful breath near the page edge anyway. Paper and ink, nothing else. I let the breath out slowly, relief loosening something in my chest. "Front room’s okay."
He watches me for a second like he’s deciding whether to argue with that, then nods once. "Stay here."
"I’m coming with you," I say.
He doesn’t argue with that either. He just turns and heads for the back, and I go with him.
The difference hits before we clear the doorway.
It isn't subtle. The heat is gone, but the air is thick with the stale, chemical bite of yesterday’s smoke that's soaked into everything and refusing to leave.
The built-in shelves are still framed along both walls, but they're warped where the fire burned hottest. What had been stacked there has collapsed into a gray, powdery mess, unrecognizable and wrong.
"Jesus," I say, because there isn’t a better word.
He steps in, then shifts half a step to the side like he’s making space for me without blocking the view. "Watch your footing."
I take two steps and then the floor tilts in a way that has nothing to do with the actual floor. My hand goes out for a shelf that isn’t there anymore, and I miss it.
His hands land on my shoulders before I hit the next step, steady, firm. "I’ve got you."
"I’m fine," I say, which isn't true in any measurable way. I look at what’s left of the inventory that never made it to the front. Boxes I ordered, unpacked, stacked, planned for that are just ash, soft and ugly and absolute. "There was so much back here."
"We’ll catalog what’s salvageable," he says.
"There isn’t—" I stop, because arguing with reality isn't a useful use of oxygen. I take another breath and immediately regret it. "It smells like it’s still happening."
"It’s not," he says. "It’s just what’s left."
I stand there with his hands still on my shoulders for a second longer before I step forward again, more careful this time, looking at the edges of what used to be there and trying to decide where to start.
He looks at me. "Did you check the office?"
"I checked the important things," I say, because I didn't check that.
Callum glances toward the office, then back to me. "There’s something else I need to tell you. Last night—"
There’s a look there that's tight and contained, like he’s already decided something I haven’t been told yet.
We don't get to the office because we hear a "Hello!" from the front.
A woman stands just inside the doorway in dark gray slacks and a light blue button-up with the sleeves rolled to her elbows.
Her black hair is pulled into a bun at the base of her neck, wire-rimmed glasses catching the light from the front windows.
She’s attractive in a sharp, tough kind of way, built like someone who could move a body if she had to and wouldn’t complain about the weight.
A plainclothes officer stands a few feet behind her, already scanning the store with the quiet, methodical focus of someone running a checklist in his head.
Callum steps forward first. "Avery, this is Detective Pham."
Pham reaches into her pocket, flips open her badge, and gives me just enough time to register Ventura PD before she tucks it away again. "I work the Stein case, assigned to the Ventura County Arson Task Force."
I look at Callum. "Exactly how involved are you in this?"
"I’ll explain more later," he says.
"Great," I say. "Love a mystery man situation right after a felony."
"To be fair," Callum says, "this week has really committed to the theme."
The officer doesn't introduce himself or linger. He drifts toward the back room and stays there.
Pham looks at me first. "How's the throat?"
"Functional," I say.
There's the slight softening I don't think she's aware she's doing, the half-beat where she decides to answer me directly instead of angling it through Callum. "We think they were looking for two specific documents."
"Which documents?"
"Your Notice of Violation. The original red tag, with the inspector's signature and timestamp. And your Certificate of Fire Clearance."
"I was about to tell her," Callum says, cutting in, his voice even but edged in a way that wasn’t there a second ago. "Someone entered the store last night using Shane’s access code."
I inhale wrong and it catches, sharp. The documents. Someone entering the store after the fire. Shane’s access code. My brain tries to grab all of it at once and fails. "Those are—" I stop, already moving. "They’re in the office."
"Avery—" Callum says.
I’m already through the back room doorway, keeping to the narrow strip down the middle to avoid the ash from the burned books spread along both sides, and I push the office door open harder than I need to.
The bottom drawer of the filing cabinet is open. Not cracked, but fully open. Papers shifted, folders pulled forward and put back wrong. The desk drawers are open too, one hanging slightly off track like someone didn’t bother to be careful.
"The folders should be under here," I say, already on my knees.
Callum’s behind me. "Avery, it seems like they looked through all the drawers."
"I put them where I wouldn't get them mixed up with everything else.
" I shove the drawers closed and drop to the floor, reaching under the desk for the stack of folders I slid there two days ago when the building was cleared.
At the time, all I cared about was hauling everything back from the pop-up as fast as possible.
"I kept some paperwork under my desk." I drag the stack out and flip through it. There.
I pull out the Notice of Violation, then the Certificate, both exactly where I left them, with signatures intact and paper unmarked.
"They’re here," I say, the breath leaving me all at once. "I was planning on taking them home. The renovation looks so nice and organized, so I wanted to keep the important stuff in a safe at home instead of pretending this is a system."
Pham pauses, just long enough for it to land. "Your having those papers is the fortunate part of what I’m about to tell you."
She tells me plainly that Stein had already filed altered versions of both documents with the county. Same document numbers, different language.
In their version, my three minor fire code corrections had been escalated to life-safety hazards requiring immediate compliance. The dates had been shifted to show I'd missed the remediation window. Additional language flagged ongoing risk to neighboring properties.
"The clearance certificate is worse," she says. "They rewrote it to suggest the system never passed final inspection. The inspector's signature is there but the approval notes are stripped. Final status changed from compliant to conditionally unresolved."
I'm quiet for a moment. "So, on paper?"