Outside, the evening had gone fully dark, streetlights humming to life along Main Street. And Frank, Norah, and Marjorie were waiting on the sidewalk when Ren finally walked out through the station's front doors.
"There she is," Frank said, relief plain on his face.
And for a moment, nobody said anything at all. The four of them just standing there under the streetlight. The particular quiet of people who had been afraid for each other and were only now letting themselves stop.
"You didn't have to give statements," Ren said. "Any of you."
"Didn't have to breathe today either," Marjorie said, pulling her into a quick, flour-dusted hug. "Did it anyway. Some things aren't optional, honey."
Norah, still pale but steadier now, reached out and squeezed Ren's hand.
"Thank you," she said quietly. "For this morning. I don't think I've said that properly yet."
"You don't need to thank me."
"I'm going to anyway," Norah said.
And something about that, the plain, stubborn kindness of it, made Ren's throat tighten in a way 4 seconds on a pharmacy sidewalk hadn't managed to.
Frank fell into step beside her as the group started walking, cane tapping an even rhythm against the sidewalk.
"Doyle tell you about Thursday?"
"He did."
"Colton's not going to let this rest," Frank said. "Man like that, he doesn't know how to lose quietly. Never has."
"I know."
"You've got a right to fight it," Frank said, glancing sideways at her. "Whatever it is you're not telling this town, Ren, you've got a right to bring it out into the light Thursday night, if that's what it takes to keep your job, and your bus route, and your grandmother's peace of mind 6 days before her surgery."
Ren didn't answer right away. She thought of Eleanor's voice, worn smooth by four decades of watching people carry weight that wasn't theirs to carry.
You don't need to win. You need to hold on to who you are.
"I'll think about it," she said again. And this time, it sounded a little more like a promise.
She didn't go straight home.
Instead, with the evening still young and her nerves still too wound up for sleep, she found herself walking toward the town hall annex two streets over. A squat brick building that housed, among other things, the county's property records office. Open until 8 on weeknights, for exactly the kind of small-town business that never seemed to fit neatly into normal working hours.
She wasn't entirely sure, walking in, what she was looking for. Only that a faded sign on a boarded-up building had been sitting in the back of her mind for 2 days now. And Danny's voice kept surfacing at odd hours, uninvited, insistent, the way grief sometimes gets loud right before it hands you something important.
The clerk on duty, a tired-looking man in his 60s, glanced up as she approached the counter.
"Help you find something?"
"I'm trying to look up old leasing records," Ren said. "For a building on the edge of town. Colton Properties. There's a sign still up. Says it was established in 1988."
The clerk shrugged and pointed her toward a bank of old filing cabinets in the back room. The digitized records only went back to 2010. Everything older than that was still living in yellowed folders nobody had touched in years.