Nora switched off her torch.
For a moment, neither of them moved.
Then Adrian knocked twice.
“Your mother kept things up here. Personal things. I’d hate for you to misunderstand them.”
Nora looked toward the bedroom.
Moonlight leaked around the curtains, giving the furniture just enough shape to navigate.
“What things?”
“Old records. She wasn’t well toward the end.”
“My mother had heart failure.”
“Of course.”
The handle moved again.
Nora lifted the recorder, stopping the tape with her thumb.
“I’m coming out. Give me a minute.”
She crossed into the bedroom.
The wardrobe stood several inches from the wall. Behind it, a blue folder was taped to the plaster.
She pulled it free.
A photograph slipped out.
Six people stood on the steps of Wren House. A younger version of her mother occupied one end, wearing the blue cleaner’s uniform Nora remembered.
Beside her stood a woman holding a little girl.
Nora recognized the girl immediately.
Not from memory.
From a framed photograph that had stood on her mother’s mantelpiece throughout her childhood.
Same yellow cardigan. Same uneven fringe. Same small hand gripping a toy rabbit by one ear.
But in the mantelpiece photograph, everyone else had been cropped away.
A handwritten caption ran along the bottom of this one.
Wren House tenants’ meeting, October 1995. Ruth and Alice Bell, centre.
Nora brought it closer to the window.
Alice.
Outside, Adrian inserted a key into the lock.
“I’m opening the door.”
Nora glanced around the bedroom.
There was another exit: a narrow door leading to the iron fire escape behind the building.
Her mother had complained about that fire escape every winter.
Rusting to pieces. Someone ought to condemn it.
Nora tried the bolt.
It resisted.
In the sitting room, the front door opened.
“Nora?”
She pushed harder.
The bolt slid back with a metallic shriek.
She stepped into the cold.
“Nora, wait.”
Adrian appeared in the bedroom doorway.
Without his funeral smile, he looked older.
“The stairs aren’t safe.”
She started down.
The metal trembled beneath her.
Adrian reached the doorway but did not follow.
“You have nowhere sensible to take that.”
Nora kept moving.
At the bottom, the escape ladder ended above a locked service yard.
She dropped the folder over the gate, climbed onto a rubbish bin, and hauled herself across.
By the time Adrian reached the yard, she was running.
The late-night café beside the station was almost empty.
Nora chose a table beneath a security camera.
Inside the folder were rent receipts, handwritten complaints, photographs of damp ceilings, and copies of legal correspondence.
They all concerned Wren House.
The final document was a newspaper cutting.
FOUR DEAD IN BOARDING HOUSE FIRE
Below the headline:
Police believe the blaze began in the ground-floor flat of resident Ruth Bell, who died alongside her four-year-old daughter, Alice.
Nora read the sentence twice.
Then she searched the names of the other victims.
Two elderly tenants.
At the bottom, a brief paragraph praised the building owner’s son, nineteen-year-old Adrian Voss, who had assisted emergency services.
Her phone vibrated.
A message from an unknown number.
Your mother protected you. Please let me explain before you destroy what she gave you.
Another message arrived.
A photograph.
Her mother, much younger, stood outside a registry office.
A little girl held her hand.
Nora.
Beneath it:
Ask yourself how she got the documents.
Nora looked back into the folder.
There was a birth certificate in a clear sleeve.
Eleanor Vale.
Her birthday.
Her mother’s name.
At the bottom, in unfamiliar handwriting:
Replacement issued following loss in residential fire.
The café’s refrigerator clicked off.
In the sudden quiet, Nora realized the folder wasn’t simply proof that someone had lied about her death.
It was proof that her mother had helped.