Wrong Dental Chart

By noon, the exhumation is local-news chopper footage and whisper-thread gospel. Someone leaks before Nico can lock the lane, and the first headline hits while I am still in the county medical office staring at a side-by-side comparison of dental charts. Tessa Mercer Hart: two capped molars, bridge on the right, wisdom teeth removed at seventeen. Unknown female from Mercer Lake: no bridge on the right, retained lower wisdom fragment, older healed fracture in the left wrist.

Nina Baird's personnel file arrives twenty minutes later from Harbor House storage. Her emergency dental intake from a workplace fall lists the same healed left-wrist fracture.

"We need formal confirmation," Nico says.

"You already have it."

"I have enough to blow up your life. I need enough to survive court."

He is right, and I hate him a little for being right when I need someone to be morally dramatic. Instead he is clinical, relentless, and therefore useful. He lines the charts back up, circles the wrist note, and asks the question I knew would come.

"Why didn't you press for dental confirmation when the coroner flagged it?"

I see the fluorescent county hallway from six years ago so sharply it might as well still be around us. Vivian in cream wool, Maren shaking, Owen wrecked and furious, Poppy asleep on a secretary's lap, everyone saying my sister had been in the water too long and the poor child needed burial, not bureaucracy. I also remember the small, ugly relief when Vivian promised she would make sure no one second-guessed me publicly if I signed off and ended it.

"Because I let grief and pressure look like mercy," I say.

Nico writes nothing down for a second. Then he does. "That's not going to save you."

"I know."

My phone will not stop vibrating. Reporters. Staff. two unknown numbers. Owen. Vivian. My mother. I ignore them all until a text from Callum breaks through: Local blog has the Nina angle already. Somebody fed them before noon.

Nico's phone rings almost immediately after mine. He listens without speaking, then covers the receiver and looks at me with a fatigue that feels older than the day. "The attorney general's office wants me to avoid naming Nina until the campaign settles down."

"The campaign?"

He nods once. "That is the word they used."

The wrong body is out of the ground, and the first institutional instinct is still to protect Owen Hart.