Leah Comes Back Broken

Leah does not die. She arrives six hours later at the task-force office wrapped in a blanket, one cheek purple, one wrist zip-tie bruised, and fury holding her together better than blood sugar. A trucker found her walking the frontage road with no shoes and too much memory.

"They wanted the sequence pages," she says once medics clear her to speak. "They kept asking if Nina left paper with the music." Her voice shakes only when she says Nina's name. "I told them they burned the wrong cabins."

Nico asks who took her. Leah closes her eyes. "Roman wasn't there. Woman's voice on the phone. man with preacher haircut in the car. One of the donor fixers. And a woman in a cream coat who never stepped inside." Vivian, then, without needing to hear the name.

Tessa kneels in front of Leah and takes the smallest possible amount of space. "Can you still do the intervals?"

Leah nods once. She taps them out on the metal hospital tray with two fingers: C-sharp, A, F, D, B. pause. G. repeat with variants. It sounds meaningless until Tessa swears under her breath and looks up at me.

"It's the old lesson book code," she says. "Nina was using the Mercer piano scales chart from when we were girls. Each interval maps to a drawer family and year."

I feel the past open like another locked wall. The Mercer lesson room still exists above my mother's conservatory, untouched because wealthy women preserve artifacts even when they cannot preserve daughters. If the scale chart is there, Leah's music becomes data.

Leah catches my hand before I leave. "They were scared, Sloane. Not angry. scared." She swallows. "Whoever is behind Vivian doesn't want just the grave fixed. They want the names to stay rich."

That sentence follows me all the way to my mother's house.