The Ash Between Names

AIRowling

An AI-authored novel. Generated end-to-end by the AIRowling pipeline — no sentence written or edited by a human.
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Chapter 1

The train left the town behind before Wren had properly registered that she was leaving it. She watched the station platform shrink through the glass pane—three figures standing in the grey light, a stack of wooden crates, the skeletal outline of the water tower—and then the landscape folded itself into trees and then into nothing. Her reflection in the window was pale and indistinct, a ghost superimposed over the passing fields. She pressed her palm flat against the cold surface and felt the vibration of the tracks travel up her arm, a steady, rhythmic hum that matched the throbbing behind her eyes.

She had not cried at the reading of the will. She had not cried when they lowered the casket into the damp earth. Now, three days into the journey back, with the air growing thicker and warmer with every mile, the tears came without warning. She wiped them away with the back of her hand, angry at the betrayal of her own body. Grief was a discipline, her father had once told her, something to be managed like a ledger. You allocated your sorrow in portions, you balanced the books, and you kept the accounts clear. But the ledger was closed now, and Wren was alone with the silence.

The carriage was nearly empty. A farmer in a worn cap slept in the corner, his mouth open, a string of saliva catching the dusty light. An elderly woman knitted something grey and shapeless, the needles clicking a slow counter-rhythm to the wheels. Wren stared out at the blurring green, counting the seconds between the telegraph poles, trying to anchor herself in the tangible mathematics of distance and time. Three hundred miles from the city. Twelve hours on the railway. One lifetime of debt.

When the train finally slowed, the air that seeped through the cracked window was heavy, saturated with moisture and the scent of decaying vegetation. It was a smell she remembered from childhood—wet earth, rotting leaves, the deep, fungal musk of the swampy ground that surrounded the town. It was the smell of things left to decompose in the dark.

Oakhaven station was smaller than she recalled. A single wooden platform, warped and splintered, stretching out beneath a corrugated iron roof that groaned in the wind. The stationmaster, a young man with a face too smooth for his age, stepped forward to help her with her trunk. He took the handle, his grip firm, and Wren felt a sudden, sharp pang of recognition. His hands were broad, his fingers thick-jointed. She had seen those hands before, moving with the same deliberate care over brass fittings and polished wood.

"You're Halloway?" the stationmaster asked.

"Wren Halloway," she said. Her voice sounded foreign to her own ears, flat and clipped.

Uncle Silas had sent a carriage. He had been waiting since morning.

Wren nodded. She had expected Silas to meet her, though she had not told him she was coming until the telegram three days prior. The news of her father's illness had reached her in Birmingham, carried by a letter written in a hand that trembled so badly the ink had bled into the paper. Come home, it had said. The accounts are a mess. She had packed her bags that night, told her landlord she was leaving, and caught the first train south. She had imagined a quick visit, a few days of sitting by the bedside, a funeral, and then the return to her life in the city. But the train ride had given her time to think, and the thinking had given her fear.

The carriage was a black landau, the paint peeling in strips along the fenders. Silas stood beside it, leaning against the driver's seat with an ease that suggested he had been born to this posture. He was a large man, broad-shouldered and solid, wearing a dark coat that strained across his chest. His grey hair was swept back from a forehead that was already beginning to recede, and his green eyes caught the dull light as he straightened up to greet her.

"Well," he said, his voice booming in the empty station. "You look like her. God, you look exactly like her."

He reached for her trunk before she could refuse. Wren stepped back, taking the handle from his grip.

"I can manage, thank you," she said.

Silas smiled, but it didn't reach his eyes. "Of course, of course. I'm just eager to get you home. The house... well, it's been quiet. Too quiet."

They drove through the town in silence. Oakhaven had not changed. The same brick buildings lined the main street, their facades stained with soot and time. The same shop windows displayed the same wares—dry goods, boots, jars of pickled vegetables—behind glass that needed washing. The same people walked the sidewalks, their faces turned down against the wind, their hands buried deep in their pockets. Wren noticed everything. Children kicked at broken bottles in the gutters, glass crunching under their boots. Women pulled their shawls tighter around their necks, fingers twisting the wool. Men stood in groups outside the pub, their faces grim, their voices low.

The funeral home stood on the edge of town, where the paved road gave way to gravel and the houses became smaller, more crowded together. It was a Victorian structure, tall and narrow, with a steep gable roof and a wraparound porch that sagged slightly on the left side. The paint was white, but it was a dirty white, yellowed by decades of sun and rain. The windows were dark, as if the house had closed its eyes against the world.

Silas pulled the carriage to a halt in front of the steps. He climbed down and offered her his hand, which she ignored as she lifted herself down. The gravel crunched beneath her boots, a harsh sound in the stillness.

"Welcome home," Silas said.

The front door was unlocked. Wren pushed it open, and the smell hit her immediately—formaldehyde, stale lilies, and something else, something metallic and old, like blood dried on copper. The foyer was dim, the light filtering through the dust-covered windows in thin, grey beams. A grand staircase rose to the left, its banister polished to a dull shine by years of passing hands. To the right, a doorway led into the parlor, where two black-draped chairs sat empty, facing the fireplace.

"It's exactly as he left it," Silas said, stepping inside and closing the door behind them. The click of the latch was loud in the silence. "I've kept things running. Routine services. Two cremations last week. A burial on Tuesday. Nothing major."

Wren hung her coat on the hook by the door. The wood was warm beneath her fingers, worn smooth by her father's touch. "I'll need to see the books, Uncle Silas. The ledger. All of them."

Silas's smile tightened at the corners. "Of course. The office is through here."

He led her down a short corridor to a small room at the back of the house. The office was exactly as she remembered: a heavy oak desk, a leather chair that had been patched with tape, shelves lined with ledgers and files, and a window that looked out onto the embalming room. On the desk sat a single ledger, its cover cracked and faded, its pages yellowed with age.

Wren approached the desk and placed her hand on the ledger. The leather was cool and slightly sticky beneath her fingertips.

"I want to go through everything," she said. "Every entry. Every transaction."

Silas leaned against the doorframe, crossing his arms. "Wren, you've just arrived. You're tired. Permit me to show you the highlights first. Your father was... meticulous. The business was stable. There's no need to—"

"There is always a need," Wren said. She opened the ledger. The first page was dated twenty years ago. The handwriting was her father's—neat, precise, angular. The entries were listed in columns: date, name of the deceased, service type, cost, payment received. And then, in a separate column to the right, smaller and less legible, were other notes. Ash mix. Mill delivery. Balance transferred.

"What are these notes?" Wren asked, pointing to the marginalia.

Silas followed her gaze and stiffened. "Just internal reminders. Inventory codes. Your father used shorthand."

Wren turned the page. The entries continued, year after year, decade after decade. The numbers grew larger. The notes grew more frequent. 47 units delivered. Q3 surplus. Mill contract renewed.

"I want to see the rest of the files," she said. "The ones that aren't in this book."

Silas pushed himself off the doorframe and stepped into the room. He moved to the shelves and ran his fingers along the spines of the binders. "Those are mostly old records. Pre-dating my involvement. Your father handled them himself. He was very protective of his privacy."

Wren's finger stopped on a spine—1898–1903—and she drew it half an inch from the shelf. Silas's hand closed over hers, firm but not unkind. She withdrew it slowly, deliberately, and turned the page she'd been on instead.

Silas crossed his arms again, his jaw tightening. "Wren, listen to me. This house, this business, it's all we have left. Your father worked hard to keep it afloat. Through the depression, through the war, through everything. He made sacrifices. Hard choices. And now that he's gone, I need you to understand that some things are best left undisturbed. Some doors shouldn't be opened."

Wren set the ledger flat on the desk and pressed her palm flat against its cover—a gesture of finality, not threat. She met his eyes and held them until he looked away first.

Silas pressed away from the frame and entered the chamber. He approached the shelving and traced his fingertips along the leather bindings. "These are largely archival matters. Predating my tenure. Your father managed them personally. He was exceedingly guarded regarding his affairs."

"I'm not asking about his privacy, Uncle Silas. I'm asking about the business."

Silas turned to face her. His green eyes were hard, his jaw set. "Wren, heed my warning. This house, this business, it is all we have left. Your father worked tirelessly to keep the enterprise solvent, surviving the lean years of the depression and the turmoil of the war alike. He gave up much. Made grave decisions. And now that he is gone, I need you to understand that some matters are best left undisturbed. Some doors should remain shut."

Wren looked at him, really looked at him, and saw the tension in his hands, the slight tremor in his left finger. She saw the fear beneath the bluster, the desperation beneath the authority.

"Some doors," she said slowly, "are already open."

She closed the ledger and picked it up. It was heavier than she expected.

"I'm going to rest," she said. "Tomorrow, we begin."

Silas held her gaze for a long moment, then nodded. "Tomorrow. Yes. Rest well, Wren."

He left the room, closing the door softly behind him. Wren stood alone in the office, the ledger heavy in her arms, the silence of the house pressing in around her. She could hear the faint hum of the embalming fluids circulating in the pipes behind the walls, a low, constant vibration that seemed to resonate in her teeth. She walked to the window and looked out into the embalming room. The tiles were white, but stained with patches of brown and yellow. The steel table gleamed dully in the light, its drains clogged with debris.

She set the ledger on the desk and opened it again, turning to a random page. The entry was dated fifteen years ago. Elias Halloway. Payment received. 47 units. Mill ash substitute approved.

Wren traced the words with her finger. Mill ash substitute approved. The handwriting was steady, confident. Her father's hand. Her father's decision.

Outside, the wind picked up, rattling the windowpanes in their frames. Wren closed the ledger and placed it back on the shelf. She would not look at it again tonight. She would sleep, and she would wake, and she would begin. But for now, she stood in the dim light of the office, listening to the house breathe, feeling the weight of the past settle onto her shoulders like a shroud.

The silence in the room was heavy, pressing against Wren Halloway’s ears until she could hear the faint, dry creak of the floorboards settling beneath her weight. She stood alone in the study where her father had kept his accounts, staring at the ledgers that now seemed less like records and more like confessions. For the first time, she allowed herself to feel the terrifying possibility that the foundation of her life was not stone, but something far more fragile, and that the crack forming within it would soon split the world in two.

Chapter 2

The wake for the deceased man began at four o'clock on a Thursday, which struck Wren as appropriate—Thursday was the day the living made their peace with the week's accumulations before the weekend arrived to offer another. He had been seventy-three, a retired cooper whose hands had shaped oak staves for forty years and whose death came quietly in his sleep. There was nothing spectacular about the circumstances, nothing that would warrant more than the standard arrangement: a medium-grade casket, lilies from the garden centre, and the usual procession through streets lined with people who had known him by name if not by anything deeper.

Wren stood behind the preparation table and arranged her hands in front of her like a novice at prayer. The embalming room smelled of formaldehyde and something beneath it—the sweet, cloying odour of decay held at bay but not conquered. Through the small window in the door she could see the parlor beyond, where the mourners sat in the front row with their daughters kneeling beside them, and a scattering of men from the church stood near the back wall in groups that shifted whenever someone new entered. The room was warm. Too warm. She had lit the coal stove early, as was proper, and the heat pressed against the windows like a living thing.

She washed her hands again. This was the third time since four-thirty. The soap was harsh, yellow, and left her skin raw at the knuckles. She dried them on the linen towel and watched the water drip from her fingertips onto the tile. Each drop made a small sound, a precise punctuation. She liked the sound. It was honest.

"Your mother used to do that," Silas said from the doorway. He leaned against the frame with his arms crossed, wearing his best suit—the charcoal one with the silver buttons—and his expression was somewhere between amusement and concern. "She'd wash her hands until they bled. Your father would bring her tea and she'd drink it with bandaged fingers."

Wren didn't respond. She picked up the tray with the prepared implements—forceps, sponges, the small silver bowl—and carried it toward the parlor. The hallway felt narrower than she remembered, the wallpaper darker, the gas lamps casting long shadows that pooled in the corners like spilled ink.

In the parlor, the mourners turned as she entered. Thomas Mercer's body lay in the casket, which was a good one—mahogany with brass fittings, the finest they could afford from the modest estate. He looked peaceful enough. The preparator had done his work well, though Wren noted the slight stiffness in the jaw, the way the left eye sat a fraction lower than the right. These were imperfections only she would notice. To everyone else, he was simply at rest.

Mrs. Mercer rose when Wren approached. She was a small woman with thinning hair pinned severely back, and she wore black in a way that suggested duty rather than devotion. Her hands were clasped so tightly at her waist that her knuckles showed through the fabric.

"Wren," she said. Her voice was thin, strained. "Thank you for coming so quickly."

Wren set the tray down on the side table and opened the ledger to the page marked with a sprig of dried lavender. She ran her finger along the column of figures, checking the cost of the mahogany casket against what Mrs. Mercer had agreed to pay. "The lilies are from the garden centre," she said. "And the postmaster has already been informed of the burial time. Is there anything you'd like changed before we proceed?"

Mrs. Mercer's mouth moved, as if she wanted to say something else, but she nodded instead and stepped aside. Wren took her place beside the casket and waited.

The first visitor approached within the hour—a man Wren recognised as the postmaster, Mr. Abbot, who stood before the casket with his hat in his hands and his eyes fixed on Thomas's face with an intensity that surprised her. He remained there for nearly ten minutes, saying nothing, merely staring. When he finally turned away, his eyes were red but his face was composed, almost proud, as though he had performed some private ceremony.

"Did you know him well?" Wren asked when he returned to the group near the back.

Mr. Abbot started, as if he'd been caught doing something improper. "Thomas? Oh, yes. Very well. Twenty years at the post office, side by side. He was a man of routine, that one. Never missed a day. Not once." His voice cracked on the last word, and he cleared his throat. "A man of routine."

He joined the others near the stove, where they were discussing the weather and the state of the roads, and Wren watched them with a detachment that frightened her. She stood at the edge of the room, occasionally nodding at visitors, occasionally offering a murmured word of condolence, but mostly she observed. She counted the faces. She noted the way each person performed their grief differently.

Mrs. Mercer's daughter, Clara, wept openly. She sat beside the casket with her face buried in her hands, her shoulders shaking, her cries sharp and unmodulated. Every time someone passed the casket, she lifted her head, touched Thomas's hand, whispered something that might have been a name or a prayer, and then lowered her face again. It was the kind of grief that demanded witness, that required an audience. Wren found herself watching Clara as much as she watched the mourners—studying the performance of sorrow the way one might study a play, looking for the seams in the costume.

The Reverend Pike arrived at five-thirty, bringing with him the smell of rain and pipe tobacco. He was a broad man with a florid face and a voice that filled rooms without effort. He moved among the mourners like a general inspecting his troops, offering pats on the shoulder, murmured assurances, and the occasional firm handshake. He spoke to Mrs. Mercer first, placing both hands on her upper arms and speaking in a low, resonant tone that Wren could not quite hear but could feel vibrating in the floorboards.

"We shall commit him to the ground," the Reverend said, loud enough for Wren to catch, "and the earth shall receive him with honour, as he deserved."

Mrs. Mercer nodded. She did not cry. Her face was a mask of composed suffering, and Wren wondered if she had saved her tears for the burial, if she was rationing them the way one might ration bread during a lean winter.

By six o'clock, the parlor was full. The gas lamps hissed. The coal stove radiated heat that made the air thick and difficult to breathe. Someone had brought a plate of biscuits and jam, which sat untouched on the side table, and the lilies in their brass vase began to shed their petals, scattering pale pink circles across the carpet.

Wren stood near the window and watched the street outside. The sky had darkened to a deep grey, and the first drops of rain began to fall against the corrugated iron roof of the station visible down the hill. She pressed her forehead against the cool glass and listened to the sounds of the wake: the murmur of voices, the occasional sob, the creak of floorboards beneath shifting feet. It was a symphony of loss, conducted by the house itself, and she was merely a musician in the orchestra, playing her part without feeling the music.

Silas appeared beside her. He had loosened his tie and rolled up his sleeves, revealing forearms that had grown softer with age. He smelled of cigar smoke and the lavender water he applied to his collar.

"You're quiet tonight," he said.

He reached into his coat pocket and drew out a small silver thimble, placing it on the windowsill beside her elbow. It belonged to Mrs. Mercer's mother—Wren recognised it from previous wakes. Silas had retrieved it himself from the drawer where the family kept such things, the ones meant for the daughter to wear when she needed to touch the dead.

"I'm observing."

"Observing is fine." He tipped his head toward the parlor, where Mrs. Mercer was now dabbing her eyes with a handkerchief that had clearly been prepared for this purpose. "Just make sure you're visible when it matters."

She picked up the thimble. It was warm from his pocket.

"I'm observing."

"Observing is fine. Just don't forget to participate."

She looked at him. "Participate how?"

"In the grief, Wren. It's expected."

She considered this. Grief was expected of her—not just from the mourners, but from the town, from Silas, from the memory of her father. She was the daughter, the heir, the one who had returned. She was supposed to grieve in a particular way: measured but visible, restrained but genuine. She was supposed to cry at the appropriate moments and offer comfort to others while concealing her own pain. It was a script she had never been given but was expected to perform flawlessly.

"I am grieving," she said.

Silas studied her face. His green eyes were sharp, assessing. "Are you?"

The question hung in the air between them, heavy and unresolved. Outside, a cart passed on the wet road, its wheels splashing through puddles, and the sound faded into the rain.

"I am," she repeated, and meant it in a way that surprised her. She was grieving, yes—but not for Thomas Mercer. She was grieving for something she couldn't name, something that lived in the space between her ribs and refused to be articulated. It was a grief without an object, a mourning for a loss she hadn't yet experienced.

Silas didn't press the matter. He placed a hand on her shoulder—brief, firm, paternal—and moved back into the parlor to greet another visitor.

The night deepened. Visitors came and went in a steady stream. Each one performed their relationship to the dead with varying degrees of conviction. The men from the church spoke of Thomas's faith and his service. The women from the sewing circle spoke of his kindness and his generosity. The men from the market spoke of his business acumen and his reliability. None of them spoke of the things that might have been less flattering: his stubbornness, his temper, the way he could be cruel when drunk, the arguments he had with his wife in the evenings that she thought were muffled well enough for the neighbours not to hear.

Wren noticed all of this. She watched Mr. Abbot’s gaze cling to Mrs. Mercer’s daughter with an interest that had nothing to do with mourning. Two men from the church conversed in hushed tones about the mill and the river, speaking of a deal that had gone bad rather than Thomas. Her eyes settled on the empty chair near the back, where someone had clearly been expected but would not be coming.

And she noticed her own numbness, sitting inside her like a stone, cold and smooth and impossibly heavy. It was not absence. It was presence—something there, solid and immovable, anchoring her to the floor while the world around her floated in a sea of performed sorrow. She wondered if this was what her father had felt when he stood behind the preparation table for the first time. She wondered if the stone had been there all along, waiting for her to arrive.

At eight o'clock, the last visitor departed—a young man Wren didn't recognise, who stood before the casket for only a moment, nodded once with a curt jerk of his chin, and left without speaking to anyone. The parlor emptied slowly, the mourners filing out into the rain, their black coats darkening with moisture, their faces turned upward to let the water wash over them as though cleansing.

Mrs. Mercer was the last to leave. She stood before the casket for a long time, longer than any other visitor, and when she finally turned to Wren, her eyes were dry and clear.

"He would have liked you," she said. "Your father. He was a good man."

Wren nodded. "He was."

"And you'll carry on?"

"Yes."

Mrs. Mercer's mouth twitched, almost a smile, almost a wince. "Good. Oakhaven needs good men. Good women." She paused. "Rest well, Thomas."

She left. The door closed behind her with a soft click.

Wren stood alone in the parlor. The casket was still open. The lilies had shed more petals. The gas lamps flickered, their flames thinning as the pressure dropped. She walked to the casket and looked down at Thomas Mercer's face. He looked exactly as she had prepared him—pale, still, empty. A vessel. A container for the memory of a man who had shaped oak staves and worked at the post office and died in his sleep.

She reached out and closed the lid. The brass fittings caught the lamplight and threw it back in small, sharp flashes. The sound of the latch engaging was final, definitive. Thomas Mercer was now sealed inside his casket, removed from the world of the living, committed to whatever came next.

Wren remained still in the dimness, the silence pressing against her eardrums until it hummed, a heavy, suffocating pressure that seemed to seep into the marrow of her bones and rewrite the history she had inherited, leaving her alone with the terrifying realization that the ledger was not merely a record of debts, but a map of sins she could no longer ignore.

Chapter 3

The brass in the hall needed polishing.

It was a Tuesday morning, the kind that arrived with a grey, watery light that seemed to seep through the very glass of the windows rather than shine upon them. Wren stood in the foyer of the Halloway Funeral Home, a pail of warm water and a cloth of soft flannel in her hands, attending to the banister rail. Her father had always insisted on the shine. “A dull rail suggests a dull mind,” he used to say, tapping his knuckles against the wood to hear the hollow echo of the house beneath. “And a dull mind cannot honour the dead.”

She rubbed the metal in slow, circular motions, watching the tarnish yield to the cloth until her own face stared back at her—pale, dark-haired, the grey of her eyes obscured by the reflection of the dim hallway. It was a ritual. Polishing the brass was something she could do without thinking. It required only elbow grease and patience, two things she possessed in surplus. It was safer than the ledger. It was safer than the office.

A footstep sounded on the stairs. Wren looked up to find Silas leaning against the newel post, a rag in his hand, moving it slowly over the brass finial at the top of the banister. He had not been there a moment before—she would have heard him. His eyes were on the metal, not on her. "Stick to your routine, girl," he murmured, his voice low, almost conversational. "Some doors shouldn't be opened." He didn't look at her; he only watched the metal gleam under his rag, as though the act of polishing were the only thing that mattered. Then he was gone, his footsteps fading toward the kitchen, leaving behind the faint smell of pipe tobacco and the echo of words she could not yet unpack.

The office was where the questions lived.

She had spent the night before in the study, the heavy oak desk a vast landscape of leather-bound volumes and ink-stained papers. The ledger—the large, red-leather tome that sat on the bottom shelf of the filing cabinet—had been waiting for her. She had opened it. She had tried to read it. But the numbers swam before her eyes, blurring into a meaningless mosaic of debits and credits, dates and amounts.

Elias had kept the books with a precision that bordered on the religious. Every entry was dated, every sum balanced to the penny. Or so she had assumed.

Wren set the pail down on the bottom step of the stairs. Her fingers were raw from the hot water and the abrasive polish. She wiped them on her apron, leaving streaks of yellow paste across the fabric, and turned toward the study. She could delay no longer. The silence of the house was pressing against her ears, a heavy, suffocating weight that demanded she fill it with action.

The study smelled of old paper and dried lavender. The curtains were drawn, keeping the grey light at bay, leaving the room in a semi-darkness that felt appropriate for the work ahead. Wren lit the oil lamp on the desk, the flame flickering to life with a soft hiss, casting long shadows against the bookshelves. She pulled out the ledger. It was heavier than she remembered.

She opened it to the middle. The pages were thick, creamy vellum, the handwriting tight and angular. Elias’s handwriting. She traced the lines with her finger, reading the columns: Date. Name. Service Type. Fee Received.

For the first hour, she read nothing but the mundane transactions of a busy trade. A casket for Mrs. Mercer. A wreath for Mr. Henderson. A simple shroud for an infant whose name was never recorded. The numbers were small, precise, unremarkable. She checked the totals at the bottom of each month, adding them up with a pencil, verifying the sums. They matched. Of course they matched. Her father had never made a mistake.

But then she reached October of 1898.

The entries changed. The handwriting grew slightly looser, the ink darker. And there, on the twelfth day of the month, was an entry that made her pause.

October 12. Mercer, T. Cremation. Ashes returned to family. Cost: twelve shillings.

Thomas Mercer. The retired cooper. The man whose wake she had attended only days ago. Wren frowned. She knew the fee for a standard cremation was £8. £12 was the price for a viewing, for a casket, for the full ceremony. Why had her father charged twelve pounds for a simple cremation with no viewing?

She flipped back a page. September 28th. Collins, James. Cremation. Ashes retained. Fee: £15.

Maeve Collins. Her husband had been cremated without a service. Wren remembered the widow’s ashen face, the white-knuckled grip on her handkerchief, and the tremor in her voice when she asked if the ashes would be ready by Friday. The fee had been listed as fifteen pounds. That was the price for a mausoleum niche.

Wren’s breath caught in her throat. She began to flip through the pages faster, her heart beating a frantic rhythm against her ribs. She checked the dates. She checked the fees.

Every cremation that had been listed as “ashes retained” or “ashes returned to family” had been overcharged. Overcharged by amounts that ranged from three to seven pounds. Small sums. Negligible sums, perhaps, to a man of Elias Halloway’s wealth. But not to a funeral home that operated on the razor’s edge of solvency.

She closed the ledger and stared at the cover. The red leather was worn at the edges, the gold lettering faded to a dull bronze. Halloway & Son. Est. 1874.

Her father had been stealing from the dead.

No. Not stealing. Falsifying. Inflating the costs and keeping the difference. It was a systematic fraud, woven into the very fabric of the business. Every entry was a lie. Every signature was a forgery of trust.

Wren felt sick. She pushed away from the desk, stumbling back against the bookshelf. Books rattled on their shelves, dust motes dancing in the lamplight. She gripped the edge of the desk to steady herself, her knuckles white.

How long had he done this? How many families had paid for services they never received? How many widows had wept over empty urns, believing their loved ones were resting in the ground, when in fact their ashes had been scattered to the wind, or worse?

She thought of Maeve Collins. The soft, hesitant woman who had come to the funeral home asking about the urn, asking if it was heavy enough, asking if she could hold it. Wren had assumed it was grief making her paranoid, making her suspicious of the smallest details. But what if Maeve had known? What if the urn had been light because it was empty?

A knock at the door shattered the silence.

Wren jumped, her hand flying to her mouth. The lamp flickered.

“Wren?”

It was Silas. His voice was loud, boisterous, cutting through the stillness of the house like a hammer blow.

She exhaled slowly, smoothing her apron, wiping the polish from her fingers. She picked up the ledger and closed it, sliding it back into the drawer. She locked it with the key her father had given her, the one that hung on a ribbon around her neck.

“Coming,” she called out, her voice steady, measured.

She opened the door. Silas stood in the hallway, his tie loosened, his sleeves rolled up to his elbows. He held a tray with two cups of tea, the steam rising in thin wisps. He looked tired. The grey in his hair seemed more pronounced in the dim light, and the lines around his eyes were deep trenches of exhaustion.

“I brought you some tea,” he said, offering a smile that didn’t quite reach his eyes. “Thought you might need it. You’ve been in there all morning.”

Wren took the tray. Her fingers brushed his, and she felt the coldness of his skin. “Just working,” she said. “Sorting some papers.”

Silas stepped into the room, his eyes scanning the desk, the ledger, the lamp. He lingered on the drawer for a moment, his gaze lingering on the lock.

“Papers,” he repeated. His tone was light, but there was an edge to it, a sharpness that Wren hadn’t noticed before. “What kind of papers?”

“The accounts,” Wren said. “I’m catching up on the monthly reconciliation.”

Silas nodded slowly. He set his own cup on the desk, careful not to spill a drop. “Reconciliation. Yes. Important work. Very important.”

He moved closer to the desk, his hand reaching out to touch the brass lamp base. He began to polish it with his sleeve, a slow, rhythmic motion.

“You know,” he said, not looking at her, “your father was a meticulous man. He believed in order. In balance. He believed that every door had its purpose, and that some doors shouldn’t be opened.”

Wren watched him polish the lamp. The brass shone under his sleeve, reflecting the flame of the oil lamp.

“What do you mean?” she asked.

Silas stopped. He turned to look at her, his green eyes hard and cold. “I mean that there are things in this house, Wren, that are best left undisturbed. Your father did what he had to do to keep this business afloat. To keep us afloat. And sometimes, the truth isn’t the most important thing. Sometimes, survival is.”

Wren felt a chill run down her spine. “Are you saying I shouldn’t look at the accounts?”

“I’m saying,” Silas said, his voice dropping to a whisper, “that you should stick to your routine duties. The public face of the funeral home. The flowers. The arrangements. Let the numbers be. Let the past be.”

He picked up his tea and drank it in one gulp, wincing at the heat. Then he set the cup down and turned to leave.

“At dinner,” he said, pausing at the door, “we’ll talk. Properly. About the future of this place. But for now… just polish the brass, Wren. Let the brass shine.”

He left. The door clicked shut behind him.

Wren stood alone in the study, the silence rushing back in to fill the space he had left. She looked at the ledger in the drawer. She looked at the brass lamp, shining under Silas’s sleeve.

She picked up the cloth and the pail. She went back to the hall.

The banister was dull again. The tarnish had returned, creeping back across the metal like a shadow. She began to polish it again, her movements slow, deliberate, angry.

She polished until her arms ached. She polished until the brass reflected her face perfectly, clearly, without distortion. And she stared at herself, at the grey eyes, the dark hair, the set jaw, and she wondered if she was her father’s daughter. If she was Silas’s niece. Or if she was something else entirely. Something new. Something dangerous.

The house breathed around her. The clocks ticked. The brass shone. And Wren Halloway, standing alone in the hallway, felt the first crack form in the foundation of everything she thought she knew.

It wasn’t a crack. It was a fracture. And it was spreading.

She stopped polishing. She set the cloth down. She listened to the silence.

And she waited for the next knock at the door.

The morning post arrived on a tray of tarnished silver, three envelopes and a catalogue for a Birmingham dry-goods merchant that Wren discarded without reading. She sat behind the heavy oak desk in the front office, the one her father had occupied for twenty years, and opened the letter with a brass knife. The handwriting was neat, looping, the kind of penmanship that suggested a woman who had once paid attention to her lessons. Mrs. Gable. Arthur's wife.

Arthur Gable had been interred on a rainy Wednesday in October, six months past. A small service, three attendees beyond Wren and Silas: Mrs. Gable, a nephew from Wolverhampton, and a clergyman who had seemed uncomfortable with the brevity of it all. Wren had offered the standard arrangements—the medium-grade casket, the lilies from the florist on High Street, the service conducted with the quiet efficiency her father had taught her. She had not expected a letter.

She read twice. The paper was thin, the ink slightly blurred where the writer's pen had lingered too long on a word.

Dear Miss Halloway, it began. I hope this letter finds you well. I have been meaning to write for some months, though I could never quite find the right occasion. Mr. Gable's birthday approaches in November, and I found myself thinking of the service you arranged for him. It was so peaceful. So comforting.

Wren set the letter down. She picked it up again. Read the third paragraph.

I suppose people do not often thank the funeral director, but I feel I ought to. In those dark weeks after Arthur went, when the house was so terribly quiet and I did not know how to fill the hours, the certainty that he was in a better place—that his soul was at rest, free from the pain that had plagued him for so long—held me together. Your kindness in ensuring that everything was done properly, with such dignity, meant more than I can express.

Dignity. Wren traced the word with her thumb. Her father had used it the way a carpenter used a level: as a tool for checking whether something was straight, whether it met the standard. He had never spoken of it sentimentally. Dignity was not a feeling. Dignity was a product. It had a price, listed in the ledger beside mahogany and brass fittings and lily arrangements.

She had spent the morning polishing the brass banister rail in the foyer, the same task she had performed every Tuesday for the past week, as though scrubbing metal could remove something that clung to the surface of things. Silas had watched her from the doorway, his tie loose, his sleeves rolled past the elbow, and said nothing. He never said much when she worked with her hands. It made him uncomfortable, the way her father's discomfort had been invisible until you looked closely at the ledger entries and noticed the gaps.

The letter said: I sleep better now. I know he is at peace.

Wren folded the letter carefully and placed it on the desk, next to the brass knife and the dry-goods catalogue she would not throw away after all. She opened the ledger. The red leather cover was worn at the corners, the gold leaf faded to a dull yellow. She turned to the entry for Arthur Gable.

October 14th. Gable, Arthur. Age sixty-one. Cause: cardiac failure. Service: Standard Cremation. Fee: £18. Remarks: Family requested simplicity.

Standard Cremation. £18. Simplicity. Words that sat on the page like stones dropped into still water—small ripples, then nothing. But beneath the words, beneath the neat columns and the careful handwriting, was the truth her father had recorded in a different ledger, the one kept in the secondary archive room that Silas had locked and thrown away the key for, or so Wren believed.

She could not trace Arthur Gable’s body once it left the parlour. It seemed likely, as everyone in Oakhaven believed, that it had gone into the crematory furnace, burned to ash, and been returned to Mrs. Gable in a mahogany urn marked delivered. That was the standard procedure. That was the dignity her father sold.

But the ledger entry said nothing about what came after the cremation. Nothing about where the ash went. Nothing about the secondary charges that never appeared on the family's bill but appeared, regularly and in increasing amounts, in the payments from Birmingham.

Wren closed the ledger. The office was quiet except for the ticking of the wall clock—a grandfather's piece, mahogany case, brass pendulum, the sound it made like a slow, deliberate breath. She had always believed in systems. Even now, with her father three months gone, she found herself organising the silence—twelve hours of it before sleep, four before coffee, two between the kettle and the door. The system kept the chaos at bay. The system was all she had.

She picked up Mrs. Gable's letter again and read the final sentence.

Thank you, Miss Halloway. From the bottom of my heart, thank you for giving me this peace.

Wren felt something tighten in her chest, a sensation she recognised but could not name. It was not guilt. Guilt implied wrongdoing, and she had not written the ledger entries, had not collected the fees, had not signed the certificates of death that her father had prepared with a steady hand and a pen that never shook. She was not responsible for what had happened before she arrived.

But she was responsible for what happened now. For the letter she had received and could not return unopened. For the peace Mrs. Gable slept in, built on a foundation she did not understand. For the ash that sat in a mahogany urn on a mantelpiece somewhere in Oakhaven, too light, perhaps, for what it was supposed to contain.

Wren stood. She carried the letter to the back of the house, past the parlour where the lilies from Thomas Mercer's wake had begun to brown at the edges, their petals curling like old skin. She passed the embalming room, the door ajar, the smell of formaldehyde sharp and chemical in the corridor air. She did not look inside. She continued down the hall to the small sitting room her mother had used before she died, before the illness took her in pieces, the way illness does, slowly enough to prepare and suddenly enough to overwhelm.

The sitting room was unchanged. The same rose-patterned wallpaper, the same armchair with the torn velvet on the left arm, the same small table holding a photograph of Elias Halloway in his prime—white hair, brown eyes, a face that looked like it had never questioned anything. Wren set Mrs. Gable's letter on the table beside the photograph. She stood there for a moment, looking at her father's face, wondering if he had ever considered the women who wrote to thank him for their peace. Wondering if he had ever wondered what they would say if they knew.

She returned to the office. She sat at the desk. She picked up the brass knife and began to sharpen it on the whetstone her father kept in the drawer, the motion rhythmic and precise, the blade catching the grey light as it turned. Outside, the wind moved through the trees behind the funeral home, and the house breathed around her, ticking and settling and enduring, as it always had, as it would continue to do whether she chose to honour it or dismantle it.

The sharpening continued. Stroke. Stroke. Stroke. Each pass of the stone against the steel removing a fraction of metal, revealing something sharper beneath.

She would write back to Mrs. Gable. She would say the right things. She would use the words her father had taught her, the ones that sounded like comfort and meant nothing at all. That was what she would do. That was what she had always done.

But she did not fold the letter and put it away. She left it on the desk, face up, next to the open ledger, and she stared at the entry for Arthur Gable until the words blurred and the room tilted and the ticking of the clock became something else entirely—a countdown, or a heartbeat, or the sound of something breaking that had been held together for far too long.

Wren Halloway remained seated, her gaze fixed upon the heavy oak door that partitioned the office from the embalming room, while the silence stretched taut and unbroken.

Chapter 4

The walk to the timber mill took forty minutes along the river road, and Wren counted each one. She had told Silas she was visiting the florist on High Street for lilies—Thomas Mercer's anniversary was approaching, and she preferred to select the arrangements herself rather than leave it to the shop girl. It was a small lie, the kind her father had told without thinking, the kind that felt like lying only because she was telling it now, with the knowledge of what else her father had lied about.

The morning had cleared to a pale, washed-out blue, the kind of sky that suggested rain had fallen sometime during the night but had decided against returning. Wren wore her father's old overcoat, the charcoal wool one he kept hanging by the parlour door for customers who came in winter. It smelled faintly of him—tobacco and camphor and something she could not identify, something that made her throat tight when she caught it unexpectedly. She pulled the collar higher against the chill.

Oakhaven lay behind her now, the funeral home's gable end disappearing around the bend, followed by the row of shops on Market Street, the church tower, the water tower with its rusted skeleton. Ahead, the river road narrowed and the buildings thinned, giving way to fields and hedgerows and then, finally, to the industrial strip that ran along the eastern bank of the Oak. She had passed these buildings a hundred times without really seeing them. The timber mill occupied the largest parcel—a sprawling complex of brick and corrugated iron, its chimneys dark since the owner had died two years ago and his sons had taken the business to Derbyshire, where rents were cheaper and the timber was fresher.

But the mill was not empty. Smoke still rose from one of the stacks, thin and grey, and the sound of machinery reached her before she saw the building itself—a low, grinding thrum that vibrated in her teeth.

Wren slowed her pace. She stood at the edge of the yard and looked.

The complex was larger than she had imagined. Three main buildings formed an L-shape around a central courtyard, their brick walls stained with decades of soot and rain. The nearest building housed the sawmill proper—the great iron wheel still turned, driven by a water channel that diverted from the river. Sawdust lay everywhere, piled in drifts along the gutters, coated the ground in a pale yellow powder that crunched beneath her boots. The air smelled of fresh-cut wood, sharp and resinous, undercut by something darker—a chemical tang that made her nose wrinkle.

She stepped closer. The courtyard was cluttered with stacks of lumber, some freshly cut and pale, others weathered to silver-grey. A steam engine sat idle beside the main building, its boiler cold, its flywheel still. Beyond it, behind a fence of rusted wire, she could see the crematory's chimney—the one attached to the funeral home, not this one. The timber mill's chimney was separate, taller, and older.

Wren approached the nearest building. The door was open, a gap wide enough for a man to walk through but not wide enough for a cart. She hesitated, then pushed it wider with her shoulder and stepped inside.

The interior was vast and dim, light filtering through grime-caked windows high on the brick walls. The floor was covered in sawdust, thick and deep, muffling her footsteps. She could see the sawmill machinery in the centre of the space—the great circular blade, the conveyor belts, the rollers that fed timber through. All of it was still. But along the far wall, in a section cordoned off by a low brick partition, she saw movement.

A man stood at a workbench, his back to her, bent over something she could not see. He wore a canvas apron stained dark with grease, and his sleeves were rolled to the elbow, revealing forearms dusted with pale powder. Beside him, on a shelf, sat a row of burlap sacks, their openings tied with twine. One of them had split at the seam, and a trickle of fine grey ash leaked from it onto the floor.

Wren stopped breathing for a moment. The ash was the colour of wood smoke, but finer than anything she had seen from a fireplace. It lay on the floor in a thin, uniform layer, almost like flour. She knelt and touched it with her fingertip. It was warm.

"You're not supposed to be in here," the man said, without turning around.

Wren rose slowly. "I'm sorry. I didn't mean to intrude."

The man turned. He was older than she expected—fifty, maybe fifty-five, with a face that had been handsome once and had since been worn down by something, the way stone gets worn down by water. His eyes were pale, almost colourless, and they studied her with a kind of tired curiosity.

"You're the Halloway girl," he said. Not a question. "Wren, isn't it?"

"Yes."

"Your father used to send men out here. Every week, sometimes twice a week. They'd load these sacks—" he nodded toward the burlap bags on the shelf—"and take them back to the crematory."

Wren's pulse quickened. "Take them for what?"

The man wiped his hands on his apron and leaned back against the workbench. "Ash. Mill ash. Fine powder from the sawdust, collected and sifted. Your father bought it by the sack."

"For the furnaces?"

"No, love. Not for the furnaces." He smiled, but it didn't reach his eyes. "For the urns."

The word landed like a stone in still water. Wren felt the surface of things tilt, just slightly, the way the floor had seemed to tilt in her father's office when she read the ledger entry for Arthur Gable.

"I don't understand," she said.

The man shrugged. "I don't understand it either. I just make the stuff. Your father—or the boy he sent, the one with the loose tie and the rolled-up sleeves—" he paused, considering, then nodded as if the memory had settled into place—"Silas, was it? He'd come out, inspect the sacks, check the fineness of the powder with his fingers. If it was too coarse, he'd send it back. If it was right, he'd pay and take it away."

"What for?" Wren pressed. "What does mill ash go in an urn for?"

The man looked at her for a long moment. Something flickered across his face—pity, or recognition, or both. "I've asked that question myself, miss. More than once. But I'm just the miller. I cut the wood. I collect the dust. I don't ask where it goes." He tapped the workbench with one finger. "But I'll tell you this: the stuff your father bought wasn't sawdust. Not exactly. It was the residue from the boilers. The burners. The things that went into the fire and came out the other side as powder. Fine as flour. Light as air."

Wren felt the air leave her lungs. "What goes into the boilers?"

The man's expression shifted. The tired curiosity hardened into something else—caution, or fear, or the simple instinct of a man who understood that some questions were better left unanswered. "Wood," he said flatly. "Coal. Occasionally other refuse. I don't sort it. I just tend the fire."

The man's expression shifted. He took a half-step back, his hand drifting to the edge of the workbench, fingers finding purchase on the rough wood. "Wood," he said flatly. "Coal. Occasionally other refuse. I do not sort it. I merely tend the fire."

"Can I see the boiler room?" she asked.

The man's jaw tightened. "That's not part of the tour, miss."

"I'm not on a tour." She stepped closer, past the low brick partition, past the workbench, toward the corridor that led deeper into the building. "My father was Elias Halloway. I run the funeral home now. I have a right to know what kind of materials he was buying."

The man followed her, his footsteps heavy on the sawdust-covered floor. "You have a right to ask questions, miss. But not all answers are yours to hear."

They reached a heavy iron door set into the brick wall. The man put his hand on the handle and paused. "The boiler room's not open to visitors. Your father knew that. He never asked to come in himself."

Wren looked at the door. It was old, painted over so many times that the paint had built up into ridges along the edges. A small brass plate was affixed to it, the lettering worn almost unreadable: BOILER HOUSE — AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY.

"Open it," she said.

The man shook his head. "I can't do that."

"Then I'll open it myself."

She reached for the handle. The man caught her wrist. His grip was firm but not brutal, and his eyes held hers with an intensity that surprised her.

"Miss Halloway," he said, and his voice had changed. Gone was the tired curiosity. In its place was something colder, more measured. "Some things you're better off not knowing. Your father understood that. Maybe you should too."

Wren looked at his hand on her wrist, then up at his face. She thought of Silas, of how he had polished the brass fixtures in the foyer while telling her to stick to routine duties, of how his eyes had flicked away when she asked about the secondary archive room. She thought of her father, dead six months, his ledger open on her desk, his handwriting neat and precise and full of lies.

She pulled her wrist free. "I'm not my father," she said.

The man released her. He stood there for a moment, studying her, then stepped aside.

Wren turned the handle. The door opened with a groan of rusted hinges, and a wave of heat hit her face—dry and acrid, carrying the scent of burnt wood and something else, something metallic and sour that made her stomach turn. She stepped inside.

The boiler room was smaller than she expected, a single chamber dominated by a massive iron furnace that ran the length of the far wall. The coals had been banked but not extinguished; a dull, bruised glow persisted beneath a layer of grey dust, casting a sickly amber light across the brick surfaces. The heat was intense, pressing against her skin like a physical weight. Along the walls, rows of iron grates held piles of material—coal, yes, but also wood, and something that looked like bone fragments, bleached white and cracked, mixed in with the blackened remnants of what might have been furniture, or clothing, or something else entirely.

Wren approached the furnace. She knelt beside the grate and reached out, stopping just short of touching the pile. The bone fragments were small, broken, and unmistakable. They had been burned—thoroughly, completely—but not finely enough to be ash. They were the residue of something that had been heated and then left to cool, scraped from the firebox and dumped here, in the corner of a boiler room that no visitor was supposed to enter.

She felt her hands shake. She closed them into fists to stop it.

Behind her, the man said quietly, "That's what comes out the other side. What doesn't burn clean. What gets swept from the flue and dumped in the corner. Your father collected it. Sifted it through screens until it was fine enough for an urn. Called it 'filler.' Said it was indistinguishable from cremated remains to anyone who didn't know what to look for."

Wren stood. She turned to face him. The heat made her eyes water, and she blinked rapidly, trying to keep the vision clear.

"How long?" she asked.

The man shrugged. "Longer than you'd think. Your father was first in here when I was a boy. He knew what he was doing. Knew how to make it look right. Made sure the ash was the colour of bone, the texture of bone, the weight of bone. He was thorough. That's the thing about your father—he was thorough."

Wren thought of the ledger. Of the neat columns and the careful handwriting. Of the payments from Birmingham that appeared alongside the cremation fees, payments that grew larger and more regular over the years. Forty-seven bodies, Dr. Thorne had said, though she had not yet met him. Forty-seven bodies sold to medical schools and replaced with mill ash. Forty-seven urns sitting on mantelpieces in houses across Oakhaven, too light, perhaps, for what they contained.

"Thank you," she said. The words felt inadequate, hollow, the way her father's words had been hollow when he spoke of dignity.

The man nodded once, briefly, then turned and walked back toward the workroom. He did not look back.

Wren stood in the boiler room for a long time, listening to the furnace breathe, feeling the heat press against her skin, watching the embers glow and fade and glow again. She thought of the walk back to the funeral home—forty minutes along the river road, past the fields and the hedgerows and the town that had never suspected what sat in its parlours and its crematories and its urns. She thought of Mrs. Gable's letter, of the peace she slept in, of the ash that sat on her mantelpiece, too light, perhaps, for what it was supposed to contain.

She turned and walked out of the boiler room, closing the iron door behind her with a click that echoed in the corridor like a lock engaging.

Outside, the afternoon light was fading, the sky bruising toward evening. Wren pulled her father's coat tighter around her and began the walk home, her boots crunching on the sawdust-strewn ground, the scent of burning pine and wet rot clinging to her clothes, to her hair, to the inside of her nostrils, a smell she would not forget, a smell that would follow her back to the funeral home and into the office and onto the desk beside the open ledger, where she would sit and stare at the entry for Arthur Gable and wonder how many more names followed, and how many more urns sat on mantelpieces across Oakhaven, and how many more widows slept in peace built on a lie.

The walk home took forty minutes. She counted each one.

Chapter 5

The letter had arrived on Monday, slipped beneath the door of the cottage at the end of Mill Road like something meant to be found but not expected. Wren had read it twice before she understood what it said. Would you call? It's been nearly a year, and I can't seem to find the right words. No signature. No address beyond the hand-delivery. But Wren recognised the slant of the handwriting — the way the 't's crossed with a hesitant lift, the loop of the 'y' trailing off as though the writer had forgotten what she intended to write. Maeve Collins.

She had not intended to visit. She had told herself this on Tuesday morning, standing before the mirror in the parlour, adjusting the brim of her hat until it sat at the angle her father would have approved — severe, practical, neither flamboyant nor neglectful. She was going to the florist for lilies. That was the lie she offered Silas at breakfast, and he had nodded without looking up from his tea, which was itself a small betrayal — he always looked up when she spoke of errands, always offered a comment, always made the ordinary feel like a negotiation. Today he had simply murmured something about the weather and returned to his cup. Perhaps he was tired. Perhaps he suspected.

The walk to Bramble Lane took twenty-five minutes along the river road, then a turn onto a lane so narrow the hedges brushed her shoulders on either side. Oakhaven was not a large town, but Bramble Lane existed at the edge of its memory — a row of cottages that predated the mill, predated the railway, predated anything that gave the place its reason for being. The houses here belonged to people who worked the land or kept to themselves, the sort of residents who did not attend the Sunday gatherings at the chapel and did not send their children to the grammar school. Maeve Collins was one of them. Arthur had been the other.

Wren paused at the gate. The iron was rusted, the hinges stiff, the little brass number plate — 47 — tarnished to a dull brown. She knocked. The sound was swallowed by the thick timber of the door, and she waited, shifting her weight from one foot to the other, feeling the damp of the morning seep through the soles of her shoes. She told herself she was only delivering courtesy. That was all. An anniversary check-in. Nothing more.

The door opened slowly, as though whoever stood behind it had decided, incrementally, that opening it was preferable to keeping it shut. Maeve Collins filled the doorway — not broadly, but with a presence that made the narrow space feel crowded. She was perhaps forty-two, though the years had done strange things to her face, stretching some features thin while pressing others deep. Her hair was blonde, faded to something between straw and gold, pulled back from her forehead in a manner that suggested she had not considered her appearance that morning. Her eyes were blue — pale, almost grey at the edges, the colour of the river on a foggy day.

"Wren Halloway," she said. Not a question. A recognition.

"Yes, Mrs. Collins."

Maeve studied her for a moment, and Wren felt the weight of that gaze like a physical pressure against her skin. Then Maeve stepped back and said, "Come in, then."

The cottage was warm. Not the dry warmth of a coal fire — though there was one, low and smouldering in the grate — but the damp warmth of a house that had been lived in without much ventilation. The walls were papered in a pattern of faded roses, the wallpaper peeling at the seams where the plaster had shifted over the decades. A rug covered most of the floor, worn thin in the centre, and the furniture was arranged in a semicircle around the hearth, as though the room had been designed for conversation rather than comfort. There were photographs on the mantelpiece — three of them, in silver frames — and Wren recognised one immediately: Arthur, standing in front of the mill, his arms crossed, his expression stubborn even in stillness.

"You didn't have to come," Maeve said, closing the door behind them and moving toward a chair by the fire. "It's only been a year. People forget these things."

"I don't think they do," Wren said.

That stopped Maeve. She turned, and for a moment her face was unreadable — not closed, exactly, but rearranged, as though something inside her had shifted position and she was assessing the new configuration. Then she gestured to the chair opposite hers and said, "Sit. Would you like tea?"

"No, thank you."

Maeve sat. Wren sat. The fire crackled. Somewhere upstairs, a floorboard groaned, and Wren wondered if someone else lived in the cottage — a daughter, perhaps, or a sister — but the silence that followed suggested otherwise, that the house was as empty of company as Maeve herself appeared to be.

"Why did you come?" Maeve asked.

The question was simple, direct, and Wren felt the lie rise to her throat like bile. She pushed it down. "I wanted to check in. On the anniversary. Your husband's."

Maeve's mouth tightened. Not quite a smile. Not quite a frown. Something in between — the expression of a person who had heard this particular kindness before and found it insufficient. "Arthur's anniversary," she repeated. "Yes. It's been a year."

"I've been meaning to write to you," Maeve said. Her thumb stilled on the rim of the cup. "But I never knew what to say." She looked down at the porcelain, at the blue cornflowers painted along the edge, and her mouth worked without producing words. The silence stretched — long enough that Wren wondered if she would speak again, long enough that the fire seemed to grow louder. Then, very quietly: "There are no words for it, are there?"

Wren said nothing. She had learned, over the past weeks, that silence was often more useful than speech. Let the other person fill the void. Let them reveal what they carried.

Maeve set the cup down. Her hands were trembling — slightly, almost imperceptibly, but Wren noticed. She had trained herself to notice these things. It was a skill her father had taught her, though not explicitly. You watch people, Wren. You watch them the way you watch a flame — steadily, without blinking, because if you look away, you miss the moment it changes.

"I kept the urn," Maeve said.

Wren's pulse quickened, though she kept her face still. "Of course you did."

"It's on the shelf in the bedroom. Above the bed. I — I couldn't bring myself to put it anywhere else." Maeve's voice had grown softer, quieter, as though speaking the words aloud required more energy than she possessed. "For a long time, I told myself it was because I wasn't ready to let him go. That if I put the urn away, if I tucked it into a cupboard or a drawer, it would be like admitting he was really gone. But that's not why, is it?"

Wren felt the room tilt, just slightly, as though the floor had shifted beneath her feet. "Why is it, Mrs. Collins?"

Maeve looked at her directly then, and her eyes were wet — not with tears, exactly, but with the sheen of unshed moisture, the kind that gathered when a person had been crying for a while and then stopped, unable to produce more. "Because it's too light."

The words landed in the space between them like stones dropped into still water. Ripples spread outward, invisible but undeniable.

"Too light," Wren repeated.

"Yes." Maeve's voice cracked on the second syllable, and she swallowed hard, composing herself. "I — I don't know how I know. I'm not a scientist. I'm not a doctor. But I held that urn when you brought it, and I held it, and I thought: this is wrong. Ashes are heavier than this. Even — even if his body was small, even if he was thin, ashes should weigh — I don't know. More than this." She shook her head, a small, desperate gesture. "I've held it every morning since. I take it down, and I hold it, and I put it back. It's become a kind of ritual. A ritual of not knowing."

Wren's hands were clenched in her lap. She forced them open. She forced her breathing to remain steady. Inside her chest, something was moving — a cold, sharp thing, like glass being ground into smaller and smaller fragments. She had known, intellectually, that the urns might not contain what they should. She had seen the entries in the ledger, the payments for mahogany urns marked "delivered" next to names she recognised, the discrepancies that mounted like snowdrifts along the margins of her father's accounting. But knowing and hearing were two different things. Hearing was worse. Hearing made it real.

"How long?" Wren said. Her voice sounded foreign to her — thin, controlled, the voice of a professional speaking to a client, not a daughter speaking to a widow.

"Since the beginning," Maeve said. "The day you brought it. I — I should have said something then. I should have called you. I should have—" She stopped. Her hands had begun to tremble more violently now, and she clasped them together to still them. "But I didn't. Because I was afraid. Afraid of what it meant. Afraid of what I might have to do if it meant what I thought it meant. So I said nothing. And I held the urn. Every morning. For a year."

Wren recalled her father’s hands—broad, calloused, steady—as they counted coins at the heavy oak desk, signed receipts, and closed the ledger each evening with a satisfaction that bordered on pride. She remembered the tome itself, bound in red leather, resting in the office, its pages filled with entries that told one story while the truth whispered another. She thought of Arthur Gable, standing before the mill with arms crossed and expression stubborn, and wondered if he had ever suspected. If he had known, before the end, that his body would not return to his wife, that his ashes would be replaced by something lighter, something cheaper, something purchased by the sack from the timber mill on the riverbank.

"I'm sorry," Wren said. The words were inadequate, hollow, the kind of apology that acknowledged pain without offering remedy. But they were all she had.

Maeve looked at her for a long time. Then, slowly, she reached out and placed her hand over Wren's. Her skin was cool, her grip surprisingly strong. "Don't be sorry," she said. "Be honest."

The word hung in the air between them, heavy and absolute. Wren felt it settle into her bones, into the spaces between her ribs, into the places where guilt and grief had been coiling themselves for weeks. Honest. The word was simple, almost childish in its simplicity, but it carried a weight that no single sentence could bear alone. To be honest meant to open the ledger and show it to the town. To be honest meant to stand before the council and speak the names of the dead and the crimes of the living. To be honest meant to destroy the funeral home, to destroy her father's legacy, to destroy the fragile peace that Oakhaven had built on a foundation of silence.

"I don't know what to do," Wren said.

Maeve's hand tightened on hers. "Then don't decide today. Just — don't lie anymore. That's all I'm asking. Don't lie."

Outside, the wind moved through the hedges, rustling the leaves with a sound like whispered conversation. The fire continued to crackle. The photographs on the mantelpiece caught the light, their silver frames gleaming faintly. Wren sat in the chair by the hearth, holding the hand of a widow who had carried a secret for a year, and she felt the weight of everything she had not yet understood settling onto her shoulders like a shroud.

When she rose to leave, Maeve did not release her hand immediately. She held on for a moment longer, as though anchoring Wren to the room, to the truth, to the small warm cottage at the end of Bramble Lane where the wallpaper peeled and the fire smouldered and the urn sat on a shelf above the bed, too light to be real.

"Thank you for coming," Maeve said.

Wren nodded. She could not speak. She pulled her hand free, turned, and walked back out into the grey afternoon, feeling the damp of the morning seep through her shoes, feeling the weight of the urn in Maeve's house, feeling the first certain thing she had known in weeks settle into her chest like a stone dropped into deep water.

She would not look away from the ledger again.

Chapter 6

The house smelled of damp wool and old paper. Wren stood in the centre of the hall, her hand resting on the banister, and listened to the silence. It was not the peaceful quiet of a sleeping town. It was the held breath of a creature waiting for a trap to spring.

She had spent the morning at the desk, pretending to sort invoices, pretending that the ledger could be tamed by arithmetic. But the numbers were not the problem. The problem was the space between them. The gap between what the book said had happened and what the town remembered. Arthur Gable. Thomas Mercer. Forty-seven names, according to the Birmingham manifests she had not yet seen, but forty-seven ghosts, according to the silence that followed her name.

She needed to see the old records. Not the neat, red-bound volumes in the office—the ones Silas kept locked behind his desk, the ones that summarised the business in tidy columns of profit and loss. She needed the raw data. The intake logs. The crematory registers from before her father died. The ones that might show, in her father’s precise, unadorned hand, exactly what had been done with the bodies that never returned to their families.

She knew where they were kept. She had been a child, once, when the funeral home was still hers alone, before Silas moved in, before the money grew tight and the secrets grew longer. There was a door at the back of the library, behind the tall bookshelf that had always leaned slightly to the left. A door with a brass keyhole, tarnished black with age. The old records room. Her father had called it the "chronicle vault," though it was little more than a narrow closet with shelves that reached the ceiling. He had told her it was for things that must not be forgotten. She had assumed, foolishly, that it contained only receipts.

She walked down the hall, her shoes making no sound on the runner carpet. The house was empty. Silas would not be back from his rounds until evening—he had mentioned something about the railway station, about a telegram that needed to be answered, about the usual deflections that kept him away from the office for hours at a time. She had the house to herself. She had the morning. She had the key, which she had lifted from the hook by the kitchen door while pouring tea, while telling herself she was only borrowing it, while the guilt sat heavy in her stomach like a stone.

The key was cold in her palm. Brass, heavy, worn smooth by decades of use. She had expected resistance. She had expected the lock to seize, to resist her touch, to remind her that this house was not hers, that she was an intruder in her father’s legacy. But the key turned easily. Too easily. As if the lock had been oiled recently. As if Silas had known she would come.

The door opened inward, with a sigh of displaced air. The room was dark, the windows long since boarded up, the only light spilling in from the hallway behind her. She stepped inside, closed the door, and let the darkness take her.

The smell hit her first. Not the formaldehyde of the embalming room, not the lilies of the parlor. This was older. Drier. The scent of dust and decay and something metallic, like old pennies or dried blood. It clung to the back of her throat. She fumbled for the wall, her fingers finding the switch for the gas jet—a modern addition, installed by her father in the nineties, a concession to convenience that he had always grumbled about. The burner hissed, flared, and then cast a sickly yellow glow over the shelves.

They were packed tight. Rows upon rows of ledgers, bundles of letters tied with string, glass jars containing locks of hair and faded photographs, and smaller books—intake logs, crematory registers, physician’s certificates. Everything was labelled in her father’s hand, the ink faded to brown, the paper brittle at the edges. She ran her fingers along the spines, feeling the texture of the years. Seventeen eighty-four. Eighty-nine. Ninety-two. Two thousand and three. The timeline stretched back further than she had realised, further than she had wanted to know.

She pulled the register for Arthur Gable. The pages were stiff, reluctant to turn. She found the entry. October 14th. Man. Sixty-one. Cardiac failure. Next of kin: Mrs. Eleanor Gable. Service: Standard Cremation. Fee: £18. She turned the page. Nothing. She turned another. And another. The register ended three weeks later, with no mention of where the body had gone, no notation of the ashes being returned, no signature from the bereaved wife acknowledging receipt.

She pulled another. Thomas Mercer. March 3rd. Male. Seventy-three. Natural causes. Next of kin: none listed. Service: Standard Cremation. Fee: £12. Again, nothing. No confirmation of return. No record of the urn being delivered. Just the entry, and then silence.

She pulled another. And another. The pattern was absolute. Every cremation, every body, every name on the ledger ended in the same place: with a fee charged, a service rendered, and then nothing. No trail. No proof. No accountability. It was as if the bodies had simply vanished into the earth, into the smoke of the crematory, into the ash that Elias Halloway had purchased by the sack from the timber mill and shaken into ceramic vessels to be handed to grieving families.

Wren pressed her palms flat against the top of the shelf, feeling the vibration of the house through the wood. The floorboards hummed. The walls breathed. And somewhere, beyond the door, beyond the library, beyond the wall that separated her from the rest of the house, she heard a footstep.

It was faint. Muffled by the thickness of the walls and the distance. But it was there. A shift of weight. A pause. Then another step, closer.

She froze. Her hand went to her mouth, stifling a gasp. The light buzzed overhead, steady and indifferent. The shelves loomed around her, towering and oppressive, filled with the accumulated weight of forty years of lies. She wanted to run. She wanted to tear the ledgers from the shelves and scatter them across the floor and burn them all. But she stayed. She stood rooted to the spot, listening, waiting, her heart hammering against her ribs like a trapped bird.

The footsteps stopped. Just outside the door.

She could hear breathing now. Slow, measured, deliberate. Not the hurried breath of someone walking quickly, but the calm, controlled respiration of someone who knew exactly where they were, who had been waiting for this moment, who had known she would come.

Silas.

She did not need to see him to know it was him. She could feel his presence pressing against the door, a weight in the air, a heat in the room that had nothing to do with the gaslight. He was standing on the other side of the wood, listening to her breathing, listening to the rustle of pages, listening to the silence of a granddaughter who thought she was alone.

"Wren," he said. His voice was muffled by the door, but clear enough. Calm. Almost gentle. "I thought you were in the office."

She did not answer. She could not. Her throat had closed, sealed shut by fear and guilt and the terrible, undeniable certainty that he had known. That he had always known. That he had let her come here, let her open the door, let her stand in this room surrounded by the evidence of her father’s crimes, because he wanted her to see. Because he wanted her to understand.

"Wren, love," he said again, softer now. "Open the door. We need to talk."

She took a step back. Her shoulder bumped against the shelf, sending a shower of dust drifting down from the top row. The particles caught the yellow light, swirling in the air like tiny, suspended stars. She wiped her face with the back of her hand, feeling the grit on her skin, feeling the tears that had begun to gather in her eyes but would not fall.

"I'm not going to hurt you," Silas said. "But you can't stay in there. The floor in this room—it's not safe. It's been rotting for years. Your father knew it. I've told him, I've told you. Some doors shouldn't be opened, Wren. Not because they're forbidden. But because what's behind them isn't meant for the living."

She pressed her ear to the wood. She could hear the faint creak of his boots, the rustle of his coat, the low, rhythmic sound of his breathing. He was not leaving. He was not going to the station. He was not answering a telegram. He had been here the whole time. Waiting. Watching.

"Why are you here, Silas?" she whispered. The words came out thin, fractured, barely audible.

There was a pause. A long, heavy silence that stretched between them like a wire, taut and vibrating.

"Because I love you," he said finally. "And because I love your father. And because what we did—what he did—it wasn't for greed. It was for survival. And if you walk out of that room with those ledgers in your hands, you won't just be destroying his memory. You'll be destroying this town. You'll be destroying me. And you'll be destroying yourself."

She closed her eyes. The darkness behind her lids was deeper than the room, darker than the shelves, heavier than the weight of forty years of buried bodies. She thought of Maeve Collins, sitting in her cottage at the end of Bramble Lane, holding a urn that was too light, wondering why her husband's ashes felt like nothing. She thought of Mrs. Gable, writing to her, asking if she would call, asking if she would remember. She thought of the forty-seven names, the forty-seven families, the forty-seven lies that had been sold as comfort.

And she thought of the key in her pocket, still warm from her hand, still heavy with the promise of truth.

"I'm not going to take anything," she said. Her voice was steadier now. Clearer. "I'm just going to look."

"Looking is taking," Silas said. "And you don't know what you're looking for, Wren. You don't know what you'll find. And once you find it, you can't unfind it. You can't unsee it. You can't go back to the brass and the lilies and the polite lies. Once you step into this room, you're in it. With me. With him. With all of them."

She opened her eyes. The yellow light buzzed. The dust settled. And she made her choice.

She did not open the door. She did not move. She stood in the centre of the room, surrounded by the weight of the past, and she listened to her uncle breathe on the other side of the wood, and she waited for the moment when the house would decide who was right.

The footsteps retreated. Slowly. Deliberately. Fading down the hall, away from the library, away from the door, away from her. She did not follow. She did not call out. She stood in the silence, in the dust, in the yellow light, and she let the ledgers remain where they were, unread and unjudged, waiting for the next time she would be brave enough—or foolish enough—to look again.

Outside, the wind picked up, rattling the boarded windows and whispering against the glass like a voice trying to get in. Wren Halloway stood motionless in the old records room, her breath held tight in her chest, waiting for the house to tell her what to do next. She did not move until the silence became heavy enough to break, her hand resting on the cold brass handle of the drawer, feeling the weight of the ledger within.

Chapter 7

Wren slipped past Silas into the old records room, the heavy oak door yielding without a lock despite his earlier insistence otherwise.

But Wren had seen the dust. It was undisturbed on the threshold, a smooth, grey skin unbroken by the drag of feet or the scuff of boots. Silas had not entered the room for weeks. Perhaps months.

She had pushed past him. Not with force, but with the quiet, inevitable persistence of water finding a crack in stone. He had stumbled back, surprised by her lack of hesitation, and she had slipped into the shadows of the archive.

Now, the door clicked shut behind her. The air here was colder than the hallway, smelling of dry rot and the faint, metallic tang of old iron. The shelves stretched up into the darkness, packed with ledgers, correspondence, and the brittle remnants of three decades of business. Wren did not turn on the light. She did not need to. She had brought a lantern, its flame flickering low, casting long, trembling shadows against the walls.

Silas followed her in. He did not close the door. He left it ajar, a breach in the boundary, a signal that he intended to make a scene.

"You are trespassing," he said. His voice was low, but it carried the rough edge of someone who had spent the day shouting over machinery or shouting at customers. "In your father’s house. In his records."

"It is my house now, Silas." Wren kept her voice level. She moved to the nearest shelf, her fingers brushing the spines of the books. They were leather-bound, cracked and faded, labeled in her father’s precise, angular hand. "And these are our records. As partner. As heir."

Silas laughed. It was a harsh, barking sound that seemed out of place in the quiet tomb of the archive. He stepped closer, invading her space, the smell of tobacco and stale whiskey clinging to his coat. "Partner. Is that what you call it? You come back here after two years, after letting me hold the fort, after letting me pay the bills when your father’s heart gave out, and you play the matriarch?"

"I didn’t ask you to pay the bills," Wren said. She pulled a ledger from the shelf. It was heavy, bound in dark blue cloth. The title was stamped in gold leaf that had long since dulled: 1898–1902. "I asked you to keep the books. There is a difference."

"There is no difference!" Silas snapped. He grabbed the ledger from her hands. She did not resist. He held it out, shaking it slightly, as if it were a bird with a broken wing. "There is only survival, Wren. And you think you can survive on principles? On the shiny brass and the fresh flowers? You think Oakhaven cares about your father’s legacy? They care about the price of a casket. They care about whether we show up when their loved ones die. And if we don’t show up, if we go under, who do you think they’ll blame? You. The grieving niece. The amateur."

Wren watched him. She saw the tension in his jaw, the way his eyes darted to the door, then back to her. He was afraid. Not of her, but of what she might find. Of what she had already found.

"I found the discrepancies," she said.

Silas froze. The ledger lowered slightly. "Discrepancies."

"In the ledger. The payments for urns that were never delivered. The fees for services that weren’t rendered. The ash."

He straightened up, his expression hardening. The fear receded, replaced by a familiar, defensive arrogance. "Ash. Yes. Ash. Your father was a practical man. He understood the economics of grief. He understood that people don’t want to see the bodies. They want to believe they are gone. Cleanly. Completely."

"They want the truth," Wren said.

"The truth?" Silas stepped forward, closing the distance between them. He was taller than her, broader, and he used his size to loom. "The truth is that the mill closed. The truth is that the town is starving. The truth is that your father kept this business alive when everyone else would have sold the land and run. He saved us, Wren. He saved me. And now you want to burn it all down because you found a few missing pounds?"

"He sold bodies," Wren said. The words hung in the cold air, stark and ugly. "To Birmingham. To the medical school. He traded our neighbors’ remains for profit."

Silas’s face twisted. For a moment, she saw something raw beneath the bluster—a flash of shame, quickly masked by anger. "He traded them to keep the lights on. To keep food on the table. To keep you in that pretty dress, walking around like you’re better than us because you went to school in London."

"I am not better than you," Wren said. "But I am not complicit."

"Complicit?" Silas laughed again, but this time it was bitter, hollow. "You live in the house he built. You wear his name. You sit at his desk. You are complicit in everything that happened here. You just didn’t know. Ignorance is a shield, Wren, but it has an expiration date. And yours just ran out."

He tossed the ledger onto a nearby table. It landed with a heavy thud, kicking up a cloud of dust. "You think you can fix this? You think you can expose the truth and the town will thank you? They will destroy you. They will destroy this family. Because the truth is not a gift, Wren. It is a weapon. And you do not have the strength to wield it."

Wren looked at the ledger. Then she looked at Silas. She saw the loose tie, the rolled-up sleeves, the sweat on his upper lip. He was not just defending the business. He was defending himself. He had been part of it. He had known. He had helped.

"How much?" she asked.

Silas blinked. "What?"

"How much did you take? How much of the money went to you?"

Silas’s eyes narrowed. "That is none of your business."

"It is my business. It is our business. The business we inherited."

"I kept the books," Silas said, his voice dropping to a whisper. "I handled the payments. I made sure the right people were paid. I made sure the supply continued. Your father… he couldn’t do it alone. He was weak. He hesitated. I didn’t."

"So you were the enforcer," Wren said. "The one who did the dirty work."

"I was the one who kept us afloat!" Silas roared. He slammed his hand against the wall. The sound echoed through the small room, sharp and violent. "While you were off in London, dreaming of a life you couldn’t afford, I was here. I was making the choices. I was carrying the burden. And now you come back, with your moral superiority and your pristine conscience, and you want to throw it all away? For what? For a few names in a book? For a few widows who won’t even remember their husbands’ faces?"

Wren felt a chill run down her spine. It was not just the cold of the archive. It was the realization of what she was facing. Silas was not just a greedy partner. He was a believer. He believed in the necessity of the crime. He believed that he was the hero of this story, the one who had sacrificed his integrity to save his family.

"You’re wrong," she said. "It’s not about the money. It’s about the dead. They deserve respect. Their families deserve the truth."

"Respect?" Silas sneered. "Respect is a luxury. We are not wealthy, Wren. We are survivors. And survival requires compromise. It requires silence."

He stepped closer again, his face inches from hers. She could see the pores in his skin, the grey stubble on his chin, the yellow tint to his eyes. He smelled of fear now, beneath the whiskey.

"Leave the ledger," he said. "Go upstairs. Polish the brass. Arrange the lilies. Do your duties. And I will forget this. I will pretend you never found anything. But if you pursue this… if you try to expose us…"

He trailed off. He didn’t need to finish the threat. It hung in the air, heavy and suffocating.

Wren looked at him. She saw the desperation in his eyes, the terror of a man who knows he has built his life on a foundation of sand. She felt a surge of pity, quickly followed by a cold, hard resolve.

"I won’t leave it," she said. "And I won’t forget."

Silas stared at her for a long moment. Then he turned and walked out of the room, leaving the door open behind him. The lantern flame flickered, casting long shadows across the shelves. Wren stood alone in the darkness, the silence pressing in on her ears, the weight of the past settling onto her shoulders like a shroud.

She picked up the ledger. It was heavy in her hands, denser than it had any right to be. She opened it to the first page. The ink was faded, but the handwriting was clear.

October 14th. Male. Sixty-one. Cardiac failure. Service: Standard Cremation. Fee: £18.

Her finger traced the words. Arthur Gable. Mrs. Gable, waiting for a letter that would never come. The urn on the mantelpiece, too light to be real.

She closed the book. She blew out the lantern.

The silence in the room was absolute, yet the ledger’s weight pressed against her palms with the cold, unyielding insistence of a stone left too long in the frost.

Chapter 8

The trunk was lighter than Wren expected. She had packed it herself the night before, folding clothes with the same meticulous care she applied to arranging flowers in the parlor—neat seams aligned, corners squared, each item occupying its appointed space—but the final weight barely justified the iron straps and leather handles. She carried it down the front steps of the funeral home at half-past seven on a Tuesday, the morning air cold and damp against her cheeks, and set it on the pavement beside the carriage hire post. The street was empty except for a milk cart rumbling past and a boy sweeping the steps of the bakery. Oakhaven looked ordinary. It always looked ordinary in daylight.

She had not told Silas where she was going. She had not told him she was leaving at all. She had risen before dawn, dressed in her father's charcoal wool overcoat—the one she had worn to the timber mill—and packed her trunk in silence, moving through the house like a ghost who feared waking the living. The ledger remained on her father's desk, face up, the entry for Arthur Gable still visible beneath the glass. She had not taken it. She told herself this was because the trunk was too small, because there was no room, but the truth was simpler and more cowardly: she needed to leave something behind, some tether to Oakhaven that would make her departure feel reversible, like stepping out to buy tobacco rather than abandoning a house, a town, a name.

The carriage driver from Oakhaven Hires arrived on a bay mare, his breath pluming in the grey light. "Train station, miss?" Wren nodded. He lifted her trunk onto the rack behind the cab without comment, and she climbed in and sat beside him, pulling her scarf tighter against the wind. The drive to the station took twenty minutes along the river road, past the timber mill with its corrugated iron roofs and skeletal gantries, past the cottages with their slate tiles and soot-blackened chimneys, past the church with its stone walls and iron gate. Wren watched each landmark pass and felt something loosen in her chest, a tension she had not known she was carrying until it was gone.

The station was small and wooden, its platform sheltered by a corrugated iron roof that groaned in the wind. A single train waited at the platform, its locomotive steaming lazily, its carriages painted a faded green that had once been cheerful and was now merely tired. Wren bought a ticket to Birmingham from the stationmaster—a man with a red face and a voice like grinding stones—and found a compartment to herself. She sat by the window, her trunk at her feet, and watched the town recede.

She had been to Birmingham once, ten years ago, when her father had taken her to visit a supplier—some man in a bowler hat who dealt in linens and velvet and spoke to her father in a low, hurried voice that made Wren feel like an intruder. She remembered the city as a wall of brick, smoke-stained and monotonous, rising from the river like a fortification. She remembered the noise: hammers, hooves, the shriek of steam whistles, the clatter of carts on cobblestones. She had been eighteen and bored and eager to return to Oakhaven, where the loudest sound was the church bell on Sunday morning.

Now she was thirty-eight and the church bell felt like a memory of a memory, and Birmingham was not a destination but a necessity.

The carriage lurched forward, jolting Wren against the stiff velvet seat as Oakhaven receded into the grey morning mist. The familiar landmarks—the stationmaster’s post, the milk cart, the skeletal water tower—shrank until they were swallowed by the endless rows of brick and then the open, indifferent countryside. She pressed her face to the freezing pane, watching the world dissolve into a blur of hedgerows and distant spires, feeling the weight of the house she had left behind settle heavier in her chest than the luggage at her feet.

The ledger would not solve itself. She had read the entries for Arthur Gable and Thomas Mercer and the dozen others scattered across three decades of red-leather pages, and she had understood the shape of the fraud: fees collected, services rendered in name only, bodies diverted, ashes replaced with mill dust. She had confronted Silas. He had denied everything, then accused her of misunderstanding, then threatened her in language so careful and measured that she knew he was choosing each word like a weapon. Some doors shouldn't be opened, he had said, and she had opened them anyway. But understanding the shape of something was not the same as proving it. The ledger was her father's handwriting, yes, but it was also her father's business. Who would believe a daughter over a dead man? Who would believe a dead man over a town that had accepted his explanations for thirty years?

She needed corroboration. She needed someone outside Oakhaven who could confirm what the ledger implied: that bodies had disappeared after cremation, that they had gone somewhere else, that the money had followed. Birmingham was the only place that made sense. The timber mill had shipped ash to the city for years—Elias Halloway had purchased it by the sack, weekly, sometimes twice weekly—and the medical schools had always required cadavers. The connection was circumstantial, speculative, the kind of inference that sounded plausible in the quiet of an office but would crumble under scrutiny. She needed documentation. Shipping manifests. Receipts. Something that tied the ash to the bodies, the money to the graves that never existed.

The train slowed. The landscape changed. The trees gave way to rooftops, and the rooftops gave way to chimneys, and the chimneys multiplied until the sky was a lattice of black against grey. Wren pressed her forehead to the window and watched the city assemble itself around her—brick warehouses, iron bridges, streets crowded with carts and pedestrians and horses that moved with the weary certainty of animals that had never known a day without work. The air through the cracked window smelled of coal and wet stone and something sharper, metallic, like the taste of blood on the tongue.

She had written to Dr. Aris Thorne three days ago, before she'd left Oakhaven, before she'd even boarded the train. The letter had been careful, measured, the kind of correspondence that suggested a distant acquaintance rather than a desperate stranger. She had found his name in a directory at the public library, along with the address of the Birmingham Medical School on Edgbaston Road. She had addressed the letter to the Director of Anatomical Studies and written, in her own hand—the same hand that had signed creeds of grief and arranged lilies and polished brass: I am writing to inquire about historical shipping records. My father, Elias Halloway, operated a crematory in Oakhaven, and I believe there may be documentation relating to cadaver supplies that resides in your archives. I would be grateful for the opportunity to review such materials. It was honest, mostly. It omitted the part about the ledger, the ash, the urns that were too light. It presented her as a researcher, not a reckoning.

The reply had come by Friday post: brief, professional, courteous. Dr. Thorne acknowledges receipt of your correspondence. The archives are open to bona fide researchers by appointment. Please present yourself at the Birmingham Medical School, Edgbaston Road, on Tuesday morning at ten o'clock. Bring identification and a letter of introduction. A letter of introduction. Wren had stared at the words for a long time. She had no letter of introduction. She had a ledger and three sovereigns and a trunk of clothes and the certainty that every minute she spent in Oakhaven was a minute Silas had to bury whatever evidence remained. She had written back immediately: I am a daughter of the Halloway family, and my father's business records are in my possession. Is this sufficient? The reply came the next afternoon: We will make an exception. Ten o'clock. Do not be late.

The train pulled into the station with a groan of brakes and a shower of sparks. Wren stood, gathered her trunk, and joined the stream of passengers filing down the platform. The station was vast and echoing, its corrugated iron roof arcing overhead like the hull of an inverted ship. Men in dark coats and women in bonnets moved with purpose, their faces set against the cold, their breath pluming in the air. Wren stood for a moment in the crush, disoriented, her Oakhaven sensibilities overwhelmed by the scale and noise of the city. A porter approached, cap tilted, hand extended. "Trunk, ma'am?" She nodded. He lifted it as though it weighed nothing, and she followed him through the station doors and into the street.

Birmingham hit her like a physical force. The noise was everywhere—cart wheels on cobblestone, horse hooves, voices calling over the din, a street musician playing a fiddle somewhere to her left, the distant roar of industry that seemed to rise from the ground itself rather than any single building. The air was thick with smoke, yellow-grey and acrid, and Wren covered her mouth with her scarf and walked. The porter led her to a cab stand, helped her into a hansom, and settled her trunk on the rack behind. "Where to, miss?" Wren gave him the address from Dr. Thorne's letter. He cracked the whip, and the cab lurched forward into traffic.

The streets of Birmingham were narrower than she had expected, the buildings taller, their facades soot-darkened and featureless, windows like eyes in a face that had forgotten how to express anything. They passed markets where vendors shouted over baskets of vegetables and cuts of meat, passed churches with spires that vanished into the smoke, passed a pub where men stood in the doorway drinking from glasses and watching the traffic with hollow eyes. Wren held her scarf tight and stared straight ahead, counting the turns, memorising the route, because she imagined she would need to find her way back.

The cab stopped outside a building of red brick and black iron, three stories high, with a sign above the door that read Birmingham Medical School in letters that had been painted and repainted so many times the edges had softened into blur. Wren paid the porter, retrieved her trunk, and stood on the pavement looking up at the building. It looked ordinary. Institutional. Unremarkable. Behind that door was a basement, according to Dr. Thorne's letter, where records were stored—shipping manifests, receipt books, anatomical ledgers, decades of documentation that would either confirm her worst suspicions or dismiss them entirely. She felt her stomach tighten, a familiar sensation she associated with standing before a casket that had just been lowered into the ground, the moment when the living waited to see if the earth would accept the dead.

She pushed open the door and stepped inside.

The lobby was cool and quiet, the noise of the street muffled by thick carpet and heavy curtains. A reception desk stood at the far end, manned by a woman in a dark dress who looked up as Wren entered. "Can I help you?" Wren approached the desk, set her trunk down, and produced Dr. Thorne's letter. The woman read it, nodded, and handed it back. "Third floor. Room 312. Ask for Dr. Thorne's assistant. She'll take you down to the archives after hours are concluded." She paused, studying Wren's face. "You're from Oakhaven?" "Yes." The woman's expression shifted imperceptibly—sympathy, or recognition, or simply the fatigue of someone who had answered the same question a hundred times. "The stairs are steep. Take your time."

Wren climbed to the third floor. The corridor was long and poorly lit, lined with doors that bore brass numbers and names. She found 312, knocked, and entered. The room was small, cluttered with ledgers and filing cabinets and stacks of paper that reached nearly to the ceiling. A woman sat at a desk, her back to Wren, writing. She turned as Wren entered—mid-fifties, grey hair pinned severely at the nape, spectacles perched on the end of her nose. "You must be Miss Halloway. Please, sit." She gestured to a chair. "I am Mr. Thorne’s secretary. I manage Dr. Thorne's correspondence and records. He's in surgery this morning—he'll join us in the afternoon." She picked up a ledger from the desk and flipped it open. "Before we proceed, I need to verify your identity. Do you have any form of identification?" Wren produced the letter from her pocket, then, remembering, added the sovereigns from her purse, laying them on the desk like evidence. The woman studied them, nodded, and set them aside. "Very well. Dr. Thorne has authorized access to the shipping manifests from 1874 to the present. These are stored in the basement archives. I'll take you down after lunch." She returned to her writing. The conversation was clearly over.

Wren sat in the chair and waited. The room smelled of ink and dust and the faint chemical tang of antiseptic. She had expected resistance, confrontation, some dramatic moment of denial from Dr. Thorne. Instead she had been met with bureaucracy—a clerk, a ledger, a promise of afternoon access. It was almost more disorienting than hostility would have been. Hostility she could have prepared for. Bureaucracy required patience, and patience was a commodity Wren was rapidly running out of.

She spent the morning wandering the corridors of the medical school, examining framed photographs on the walls—graduating classes in stiff collars and dark dresses, portraits of men with stern faces and bushy moustaches, diagrams of the human skeleton pinned to cork boards. She found a reading room with a single window overlooking a courtyard where a tree had shed its leaves and stood bare against the sky. She sat at a table and stared at the grain of the wood until her eyes grew heavy and the sounds of the school—the scratch of pens, the murmur of voices, the distant thud of a hammer somewhere below—blurred into a single, continuous hum.

Lunch arrived on a tray of dented tin: bread, cheese, a small portion of boiled potatoes, a cup of tea that had gone lukewarm before she'd finished half of it. She ate mechanically, tasting nothing, her mind fixed on the basement and the manifests and the forty-seven names that Dr. Thorne would eventually confirm—or deny. She finished her tea, washed the cup in a basin of cold water, and returned to the reading room, where she sat and waited and watched the light shift across the floor.

At two o'clock, Miss Pembroke appeared in the doorway. "Ready?" She led Wren down a flight of narrow stairs, through a corridor of concrete, and into a room that was exactly as Dr. Thorne's letter had described: windowless, sterile, humming with the low vibration of refrigeration units, smelling of ozone and old paper. Metal shelves lined the walls, stacked with boxes and ledgers and bundles of documents tied in string. A single gas lamp burned on a central table, casting a wavering light over the surfaces. Miss Pembroke set the lamp down and produced a key from her apron. "The manifests are in boxes 14 through 23. They're arranged chronologically. You may review them here, but they cannot be removed from this room." She hesitated, her hand on the door. "Dr. Thorne will be here at four. He'll want to discuss your findings." Then she was gone, the door clicking shut behind her, and Wren was alone in the basement with thirty years of her father's secrets.

She approached the first box, numbered 14, and lifted the lid. Inside were bundles of paper, yellowed and brittle, tied with twine that crumbled at her touch. She untied the first bundle and spread the pages across the table. Shipping manifests. Dates, names, weights, destinations. She read the first entry: 12 March 1874. One crate. Oakhaven Crematory. Contents: Anatomical specimens. Destination: Birmingham Medical School. Her breath caught. She moved to the next, then the next, reading faster, her fingers trembling as she turned page after page, each one confirming what the ledger had hinted at but could not prove. Bodies. Crates. Shipping labels. Signatures that matched her father's handwriting. She read until her eyes burned and the gas lamp flickered and the vibration of the refrigeration units became a sound she felt in her teeth rather than heard with her ears.

At four o'clock, the door opened and Dr. Aris Thorne entered.

He was a tall man, broad-shouldered, with a face that was neither unkind nor warm—clinical, detached, polite but firm. He wore a dark suit and carried a folder under his arm. His hair was thinning, his eyes hazel and watchful. He looked at Wren, at the spreads-out manifests, at the boxes piled open on the table, and his expression did not change.

"I see you've been busy," he said. His voice was level, unhurried, the voice of a man who had delivered bad news to families and watched them break without flinching.

Wren stood. She wiped her hands on her skirts, though they were not dirty. "I need to speak with you," she said. "Alone."

Dr. Thorne nodded. He set the folder on the table and closed the door behind him. "Miss Halloway," he said, "sit down. We have much to discuss."

She did not sit. She stood beside the table, her hands flat on the surface, feeling the vibration of the floor beneath her palms. "Forty-seven," she said. "Forty-seven bodies. Twenty years. You knew."

Dr. Thorne studied her face for a long moment. Then he nodded. "I knew."

"And you did nothing."

"I maintained a supply chain," he said. "That was my role. Your father's role was to procure. My role was to receive." He looked at the manifests spread across the table, then back at her. "Oakhaven supplied what Birmingham required. The accounts balanced."

Wren felt the room tilt. The vibration of the refrigeration units rose in pitch, becoming a whine, a scream, something she could not identify. She gripped the edge of the table to steady herself. "My father sold people," she said. "He sold their bodies. He told their widows they were cremated. He told them the ashes were returned. He lied to them."

"Yes."

"And you—" She stopped. The words caught in her throat, jagged and incomplete. She swallowed. "You kept the manifests. You kept the records. Why?"

Dr. Thorne's expression shifted, imperceptibly, the way a face changes when it decides to stop performing. "Because one day," he said quietly, "someone would need to know. And I hoped—hoped—that the person who needed to know would have the courage to look."

Wren stared at him. The whine of the refrigeration units faded, replaced by a silence so profound she could hear her own breathing, the sound of air moving in and out of lungs that had been functioning without her permission since she was born. She looked down at the manifests, at the forty-seven names, at the dates and weights and destinations, at the proof she had come to Birmingham to find and now found, heavier and more terrible than she had imagined.

"What do I do with this?" she asked.

Dr. Thorne did not answer immediately. He walked to the table, picked up the folder he had brought, and opened it. Inside were copies of the manifests, imperfect but legible. He handed them to Wren. "Take them," he said. "Take all of them. And decide."

She took the folder. It was heavier than she expected. She held it against her chest, feeling the weight of it through the fabric of her coat, feeling the weight of forty-seven lives compressed into paper and ink, feeling the weight of her father's name, her town's silence, the widows who had believed the lies and buried ash and called it grief.

Outside, the city continued its indifferent noise. Inside the basement, Wren Halloway stood alone in the lamplight and held the evidence of her inheritance in her hands and wondered if knowing was the same as acting, and if acting was the same as being brave, and if any of it mattered at all.

The lamp flickered. The refrigeration units hummed. And Wren Halloway stood in the sterile dark of the Birmingham Medical Archives, holding the truth like a weapon she did not yet know how to wield.

Chapter 9

The archive room was cold, a sterile windowless space humming with the low vibration of refrigeration units. The air smelled sharply of ozone and old paper, a scent that lodged itself behind the teeth and refused to leave. Wren stood before the heavy oak shelving, her fingers brushing the spines of ledgers that spanned three decades of business records. She had come to Birmingham on Tuesday morning at ten o'clock, carrying nothing but a ledger bound in red leather, three sovereigns, and a trunk of clothes left in storage. It had been ten years since she had last visited this city, and the memory of her father’s pragmatic coldness felt closer now than it had in Oakhaven.

The hum started halfway down. Low, constant, the vibration of machinery older than she was. Refrigeration units, she supposed. The archives needed cold preservation for the paper records, or perhaps for something else entirely. She told herself she was here for the paper. That was the plan. Paper was safe. Paper could be read and understood and filed away in a mental drawer marked facts.

The door at the bottom was steel, painted a pale institutional green that had yellowed with age. A brass plate held the words: Birmingham Medical School — Archives and Storage. Wren pushed it open and stepped into a corridor that stretched in either direction, gas jets humming overhead, their light flat and ungenerous. The floor was linoleum, cracked in places, the pattern of it worn smooth by decades of footsteps.

She walked forward.

The first room was an antechamber, sparsely furnished with a wooden desk and a metal chair. A woman sat behind the desk, her hair pinned severely back, her glasses perched on the end of her nose. She looked up as Wren entered, her expression neutral, the kind of professional neutrality that suggested she had seen every type of visitor this building had to offer and found none of them interesting.

"I'm looking for Dr. Thorne," Wren said. Her voice sounded thin in the sterile air, smaller than she intended.

The woman consulted a ledger on her desk. "Room three. At the end of the hall. He's expecting you." She didn't ask how Wren knew Dr. Thorne or why a young woman in a charcoal wool coat had arrived unannounced at nine in the morning. Some questions were simply not asked in buildings like this.

Wren thanked her and walked down the corridor. Room three was at the end, the door ajar. Inside, the room was larger than she expected — perhaps forty feet across, lined with metal shelving units that rose to the ceiling, their surfaces painted the same institutional green as the door. The shelves held boxes. Thousands of them. Cardboard, labelled, stacked in neat rows that disappeared into the shadows above. The air was colder here, the cold seeping through her coat and settling into her bones.

Dr. Aris Thorne stood near the centre of the room, his back to her, examining a folder. He was taller than she had imagined from Silas's letter — or perhaps Silas had deliberately undersold him. His shoulders were broad beneath a tweed jacket, his posture rigid, the posture of a man who had spent too many years standing in rooms exactly like this one. He turned when Wren cleared her throat, and his face was exactly what she had expected: clean-shaven, balding, eyes the colour of weak tea.

"Wren," he said. His voice was calm, measured, the voice of a man who had learned long ago that urgency was a sign of amateurism. "You've come a long way."

"The train was on time," Wren said. It wasn't quite true, but she didn't elaborate.

Dr. Thorne nodded, as if this were sufficient. He gestured toward the shelves. "I trust you understand why I agreed to show you what you asked for, but only under certain conditions. What you see here is not public record. It is medical research history. And it is sensitive."

Wren met his gaze. "I understand."

He studied her for a moment, his expression unreadable. Then he reached into his jacket pocket and produced a ring of keys. "Then let us begin."

He led her deeper into the archive, past row after row of metal shelving, past boxes labelled with dates and categories that meant nothing to her — Anatomy, 1882-1885. Surgical Cases, 1890-1893. Unclaimed Bodies, 1895-1901. The last category made her pause. Unclaimed. As if the people inside had never been claimed by anyone. As if they had simply ceased to matter.

Dr. Thorne stopped at a section near the back of the room. The shelves here were different — narrower, older, their paint peeling. The boxes were smaller, too, and their labels were handwritten in a cramped, precise script that Wren recognised immediately. Her father's handwriting.

She felt the air leave her lungs.

"Elias Halloway," Dr. Thorne said, reading the label aloud. "Fifty-two entries spanning twenty years. Your father was remarkably consistent."

Wren couldn't speak. She reached out and touched the nearest box. The cardboard was brittle, flaking at the edges, and she pulled her hand back quickly, afraid it would disintegrate beneath her fingers. Inside, she knew, was whatever had been left behind when the bodies arrived — clothing, personal effects, whatever scraps of identity remained after the medical school had taken what it needed. Or perhaps the boxes contained the remains themselves. She didn't want to think about it. She didn't want to know.

But she needed to.

"May I?" Dr. Thorne asked. He didn't wait for permission. He lifted the lid of the top box and withdrew a folder, thick with pages, and set it on a metal table that stood between two rows of shelving. Wren approached slowly, her boots clicking against the linoleum, each sound amplified by the silence of the room.

The folder opened with a crackle. Inside were pages of typed text, arranged in columns and rows, each entry accompanied by a photograph — a small, black-and-white image, grainy and indistinct, showing a face that might have been male or female, young or old, alive or dead. Wren couldn't tell. The photographs were too small, too degraded by time. She leaned closer, squinting, and read the text beside each image.

Subject 147. Male. Approximately fifty-five years. Cause of receipt: Unclaimed pauper, Workhouse infirmary, St. Jude's. Date received: 14 March 1893. Catalogue number: BMS-1893-0147. Disposition: Anatomical specimen, preserved. Notes: Decent condition. Useful for teaching purposes.

She moved to the next entry.

Subject 148. Female. Approximately thirty-two years. Cause of receipt: Died in childbirth, City Hospital. Date received: 17 March 1893. Catalogue number: BMS-1893-0148. Disposition: Anatomical specimen, preserved. Notes: Poor condition. Limited utility.

Subject 149. Subject 150. Subject 151. Each one a number. Each one a catalogued object. Each one a person reduced to a line of text and a photograph no larger than a postage stamp. Wren read them in silence, her finger tracing the lines as if the act of touching the page might somehow restore the humanity that the words had erased.

By Subject 203, she understood the pattern. Every entry followed the same format: a number, a brief description of the deceased, the source of the body, the date of receipt, the catalogue number, and a clinical assessment of the body's condition. There was no name. There never would be a name. The system was designed to ensure that names were never recorded, never preserved, never remembered.

"Your father supplied forty-seven subjects over the course of two decades," Dr. Thorne said. He had moved to stand beside her, his hands clasped behind his back, his tone the same calm, detached register he had maintained since she arrived. "Not all of them were from Oakhaven. The network extended across the Midlands — Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield. But your father's contribution was significant. Consistent. Reliable. The medical school valued him highly."

Forty-seven. The number hung in the air between them, heavy and immovable. Forty-seven people. Forty-seven catalogue numbers. Forty-seven subjects who had been received, catalogued, preserved, and used for teaching purposes, their identities stripped away before they even reached these shelves.

Wren thought of Arthur Gable. She thought of the urn on Maeve Collins's mantelpiece, too light to be real. She thought of the ledger entry — October 14th. Male. Sixty-one. Cardiac failure. Service: Standard Cremation. Fee: £18. She had read those words in the dark of the records room, her finger tracing the faded ink, and she had felt something break inside her. But this — this was different. This was the other side of the transaction. This was where the bodies ended up, after the funeral home had done its part, after the ashes had been mixed with mill ash and handed to a grieving widow who would never know the difference.

"Where are they now?" Wren asked. Her voice was steady, which surprised her. "The remains. Are they still here?"

Dr. Thorne hesitated. It was the first hesitation she had seen from him, and it gave her a strange sense of satisfaction. "Most of them were disposed of according to protocol after their utility had been exhausted. Some were reburied in consecrated ground. Others were cremated. The records for disposition are separate from the intake records." He paused. "But some specimens survived longer than others. Anatomy is a patient discipline."

Wren looked at the shelves around her, at the thousands of boxes rising to the ceiling, at the endless rows of catalogued subjects stretching into the shadows. She thought of her father, sitting at his desk in the funeral home, writing ledger entries in his neat, precise hand. October 14th. Male. Sixty-one. Cardiac failure. Service: Standard Cremation. Fee: £18. He had never once written a name. He had never once considered that the man who died on October 14th might have had a name, a family, a life that extended beyond the six feet of earth his widow would have dug for him.

"He never told me," Wren said. It wasn't a question. It was an observation, stated flatly, without accusation or grief. Just a fact, like the others.

Dr. Thorne's expression didn't change. He set the folder down, aligning its edges with the table. "You've seen the intake records. The disposition records are kept separately — they're in the east wing, locked cabinet. If you want to trace where the bodies went after the medical school was done with them, that's where you'd look. But I should warn you: the disposition records are incomplete for the earlier years. There are gaps."

Dr. Thorne’s face remained impassive. He lowered the folder to the desk, taking care to square its corners against the wood grain. “You have reviewed the intake ledgers. The disposition logs are maintained apart — stored in the east wing, within a locked cabinet. To follow the trail of the remains once the medical school concluded its work, that is your destination. Yet I must caution you: those records are fragmentary for the earlier decade. Significant gaps exist.”

Subject 312. Male. Forty-eight. Industrial accident at the Bolton textile mill. Inbound: 3 September 1898. Catalogue number: BMS-1898-0312. Disposition: Anatomical specimen, preserved. Notes: Right arm intact. Valuable for study of trauma.

Industrial accident. Textile mill. Bolton. Forty-eight years old. A man who had worked with his hands, who had earned his living in a factory, who had died in a machine and ended up here, catalogued and preserved and studied by students who would never know his name. His right arm had been intact. Someone had noted that. Someone had found it valuable.

Wren closed the folder. The crackle of the pages sounded loud in the silence.

"I need to see more," she said.

Dr. Thorne regarded her for a long moment. Then he nodded and reached for the next folder on the table. "There are twenty years of records, Miss Halloway. If you wish to review them all, it will take the better part of the day."

"I have all day," Wren said. And she did. She had come to Birmingham with nothing but a trunk of clothes and three sovereigns and a determination she couldn't quite name. She had nowhere else to be. The funeral home could wait. Silas could wait. The widows of Oakhaven could wait — though the thought of them, sitting in their parlours with urns on their mantelpieces, made something tighten in her chest.

Dr. Thorne opened the next folder. The next. And the next. Wren read them all. She read until her eyes burned and her neck ached and the fluorescent light buzzed in her ears like a trapped insect. She read until the numbers blurred together — Subject 412, Subject 413, Subject 414 — and she couldn't tell where one entry ended and the next began. She read until the words lost their meaning and became only sounds, syllables arranged in patterns that her brain processed without comprehension.

But she kept reading. Because stopping meant acknowledging that she had seen enough. And she hadn't. Not nearly enough.

At lunchtime, Dr. Thorne produced a thermos of tea and two paper cups from a drawer in the metal table. He set them down without comment, and Wren took one and drank it standing, her eyes still on the page. The tea was bitter and lukewarm and exactly what she needed.

By afternoon, she had read through fourteen years of records. Fourteen years of catalogue numbers. Fourteen years of men and women and children who had died and been received and catalogued and preserved, their identities erased by the simple efficiency of a numbering system. She had seen entries for paupers and factory workers and hospital patients and women who had died in childbirth. She had seen entries for people who had been claimed by no one and claimed by everyone, depending on which side of the transaction you were on.

On her father's side, they were fees. Eighteen pounds. Twelve pounds. Twenty-two pounds. Numbers that balanced the ledger, that kept the funeral home solvent, that allowed her to polish brass and arrange flowers and stand in parlours and tell widows that their husbands had been properly laid to rest. On this side, they were subjects. Catalogue numbers. Anatomical specimens. Items of utility.

The two sets of numbers were the same. They were just written in different hands.

Dr. Thorne closed the last folder for the day and straightened his jacket. "That will have to suffice for today. We can continue tomorrow morning."

Wren nodded. She couldn't speak. Her throat was tight, her eyes dry, her mind full of numbers — catalogue numbers, ledger entries, fees, sums, totals — all of them swirling together in a pattern she couldn't untangle. She picked up her purse from the floor where she had set it, slung it over her shoulder, and followed Dr. Thorne back up the stairs.

The station was exactly as she remembered it from ten years ago — the corrugated iron roof, the wooden benches, the smell of coal smoke and damp wool. She sat on one of the benches and waited for the train, her trunk at her feet, her mind still in the basement, still among the shelves and the boxes and the endless rows of catalogue numbers.

When the train arrived, she boarded it and found a seat by the window and watched the city recede — brick buildings and gas lamps and the dark shapes of factories, all of them receding into the grey distance, all of them disappearing behind her as surely as the catalogue numbers had disappeared from her mind, replaced by something worse: certainty.

She knew what her father had done. She knew what the funeral home had done. She knew what the urns on mantelpieces across Oakhaven contained — not ashes, but ash, mixed with mill residue and weighed out with the same precision that her father had used to balance his ledger.

The train pulled out of Birmingham station and gained speed, the wheels clicking against the tracks, the rhythm steady and mechanical and indifferent. Wren Halloway sat in the compartment and stared at her reflection in the window — pale, indistinct, a ghost superimposed over the passing landscape — and she felt something settle into her chest like a stone dropped into deep water.

She would go home. She would sit at her father's desk. She would open the ledger. And she would begin to understand what came next.

Chapter 10

The rain in Birmingham did not fall; it hung. It was a suspended grey curtain that blurred the edges of the city into a watercolour of soot and slate, turning the cobblestones slick and treacherous beneath Wren’s boots. She pulled her father’s charcoal wool overcoat tighter around her, the fabric heavy with damp, and quickened her pace. The appointment was for ten o’clock. She had arrived at nine-thirty, giving herself time to steel herself against the sterile chill of the medical school, time to remember that she was not here as a daughter seeking absolution, but as a creditor seeking leverage.

The building rose from the street like a fortress of red brick, windowless save for the high, barred slits near the roofline. It smelled of wet stone and carbolic soap, a scent that clung to the back of the throat. Wren pushed through the heavy oak door and entered the vestibule, shaking the rain from her umbrella with a sharp, metallic click. A nurse in a starched white apron looked up from a desk cluttered with ledgers and inkwells. Her expression was unreadable, her posture rigid.

"Miss Halloway," the nurse said. It was not a question. "Dr. Thorne is expecting you. The lift is to your left. He prefers the lower archives."

Wren nodded. She did not trust her voice. If she spoke, she feared she might sound like the frightened girl who had sat in the train compartment an hour ago, staring at her own pale reflection and wondering if she had made a terrible mistake. Rather, she followed the nurse's gesture, stepping into the narrow cage of the lift. The mechanism groaned, a shuddering ascent of gears and counterweights that dropped her swiftly into the belly of the building. The air grew colder as she descended, the smell of ozone intensifying until it tasted metallic on her tongue.

When the doors slid open, she was met with a corridor of white tile and gas lamps shielded by wire mesh. At the end of the hall, a door stood ajar. Dr. Aris Thorne was standing in the threshold, his hands clasped behind his back, his silhouette framed by the dim light of the room beyond. He was a tall man, balding, with eyes the colour of weak tea. He looked at Wren not with the curiosity of a stranger, but with the weary recognition of a man who had been waiting for this moment for a very long time.

"Miss Halloway," he said. His voice was clinical, detached, polite but firm. "Please, come in. Do not mind the mess. We are in the midst of a reorganisation."

The room was a windowless basement storage unit, humming with the low vibration of refrigeration units and smelling of ozone and old paper. Rows of metal shelving units rose to the ceiling, stacked with ledgers, bound reports, and crates of bones wrapped in burlap. In the centre of the room, a heavy oak desk sat isolated, as if an island in a sea of bureaucracy. Thorne gestured to a chair opposite him. Wren sat, placing her umbrella carefully against the leg of the table. She kept her hands folded in her lap, her fingers stiff with cold.

"You have the letter," Thorne said. It was a statement.

"I have the letter," Wren confirmed. "And I have the names. Gable. Mercer. Twenty others I have managed to trace. But the ledger ends, Doctor. It stops. And I need to know if that is where the record ends, or if it is merely where my access ends."

Thorne did not answer immediately. He turned to the shelves behind him, running a finger along the spines of a row of bound volumes. He selected one—a thick tome bound in cracked black leather—and brought it to the desk. He placed it down with a soft thud. Then another. And another. By the time he turned back to face her, three heavy books lay between them, along with a sheaf of loose papers tied with string.

"The Halloway Funeral Home operates on a principle of selective memory," Thorne said, settling into his own chair. "Your father understood this. He understood that grief makes people blind, and that poverty makes them desperate. He offered a solution to both. He provided a service that the town believed was complete, while simultaneously providing a service to the university that the town could never imagine. It is a duality that requires strict accounting."

Wren looked at the books. "Is this the accounting?"

"It is the manifest," Thorne corrected. "The shipping records. From 1874 to the present. Forty-seven years, Miss Halloway. Two decades of commerce."

He opened the top volume. The pages were yellowed, the ink faded but legible. Wren leaned forward. The entries were precise, devoid of sentiment.

October 14th, 1894. Male. Sixty-one. Cardiac failure. Source: Halloway & Son. Destination: Birmingham Medical School. Weight: 14 stone. Fee received from estate: £18. Payment to school: £4.

Wren’s breath caught. The numbers were familiar, but the context was alien. The fee from the estate was the standard rate—the rate she had charged Mrs. Gable. The payment to the school was a fraction of that. The difference was profit. But it was not just profit. It was theft. They had taken Arthur Gable’s body, sold it for parts, and told his widow he had been cremated.

She flipped to the next page.

November 2nd, 1894. Female. Forty-five. Pneumonia. Source: Halloway & Son. Destination: Birmingham Medical School. Weight: 10 stone. Fee received: £15. Payment to school: £3.

December 12th, 1894. Male. Twelve. Diphtheria. Source: Halloway & Son. Destination: Birmingham Medical School. Weight: 6 stone. Fee received: £10. Payment to school: £2.

Wren’s hand trembled. She closed the book abruptly. The sound echoed in the small room.

"Children?" she whispered.

"Adolescents and adults alike," Thorne said. His tone remained neutral, as if discussing the weather. "The demand for cadavers is constant, Miss Halloway. Anatomy classes cannot pause for morality. And the poor… the poor do not have families who miss them. Or if they do, those families are often too impoverished to demand answers. Your father was a pragmatist. He saw a surplus of need and a surplus of supply, and he connected them."

"He sold my neighbours," Wren said. The words felt heavy in her mouth, like stones.

"He facilitated the advancement of medicine," Thorne replied. "And he kept the lights on in this town. Do you think the funeral home survives on £18 per cremation? Do you think the roof does not leak, or the coal does not need buying, or Silas does not need to eat? The illicit income subsidised the legitimate business. It allowed Halloway & Son to remain the premier provider in Oakhaven. Without it, the business would have collapsed in 1882."

Wren stared at him. "You’re saying it was necessary."

"I am saying it was effective," Thorne corrected. "And it was sustainable. Until it wasn’t."

He tapped the stack of papers tied with string. "These are the recent records. The last five years. Since your father’s health declined, and Silas took over the daily management. The volume has decreased, but the practice continues. Thomas Mercer. Eleanor Vance. James Cole. All accounted for. All paid for. All delivered."

Wren picked up the sheaf of papers. Her fingers brushed the rough texture of the paper. She read the names. Mercer. Vance. Cole. Three names she had processed in the last six months. Three urns she had handed to grieving families, filled with ash from the timber mill, pretending they contained their loved ones.

"How many?" she asked. "In total. Over the twenty years."

Thorne leaned back, interlacing his fingers. He looked at her with those pale, tea-coloured eyes, and for the first time, Wren saw something other than detachment in his gaze. It was pity. Or perhaps it was relief.

"Forty-seven," he said. "Forty-seven bodies. Sold. Over twenty years. That is the total, Miss Halloway. Forty-seven souls traded for the advancement of science and the survival of a business. The question now is not what happened. The question is what you will do with the knowledge of what happened."

Wren looked down at the manifest. The numbers swam before her eyes. Forty-seven. It was not a handful. It was not a few exceptions. It was a systematic, calculated enterprise. It was a machine, and her father had built it, and Silas had kept it running. And she was standing in the wreckage, holding the blueprint.

"Why give this to me?" she asked. "Why not burn it? Why not keep it hidden, as your father did?"

Thorne sighed. It was a long, weary sound, like air escaping a punctured lung. "Because I am tired, Miss Halloway. I have spent twenty years looking at these books. I have spent twenty years watching men and women dissect the bodies of the forgotten, knowing exactly where they came from. I have told myself it was for science. I have told myself it was necessary. But lately, when I look at these names, I do not see students learning anatomy. I see mothers. I see fathers. I see children. And I cannot bear it anymore. I hoped… I hoped that your father would see the rot. But he did not. He doubled down. He believed he could outrun his conscience. He was wrong."

He reached into his pocket and produced a small brass key. He placed it on the desk beside the manifest.

"This opens the secondary archive," he said. "There are photographs. Medical records. Letters from the families of the donors, if any survived. Everything you need to prove it. Everything you need to destroy them."

"Then the cycle continues," Thorne said. "Silas will keep selling. The town will keep paying. The dead will keep disappearing. You will take over this business, and with it, all its accounts."

"And if I do nothing?" she asked.

Thorne’s gaze sharpened. “The wheel turns again,” he murmured. “Silas will sell, the town will pay, and the dead will vanish. You inherit their deceit, Wren Halloway. Is that the name you wish to bear?”

She did not answer. She could not. The weight of the question pressed against her chest, squeezing the air from her lungs. She thought of Maeve Collins, and the urn that was too light. She thought of Arthur Gable, and the widow who waited for a letter that would never come. She thought of her father, sitting at this very desk, calculating the difference between £18 and £4, deciding that the math was worth the moral cost.

She picked up the key. It was cold in her hand.

"I need to go," she said.

Thorne nodded. He did not try to stop her. He simply watched as she stood, gathering the manifest and the key into her bag. He turned back to the shelves, his shoulders slumped, as if the burden of the truth had been lifted from him, and he was too exhausted to care where it landed.

Wren walked out of the room, down the corridor of white tile, and into the lift. The mechanism groaned, lifting her back toward the surface, toward the rain and the grey light of Birmingham. She stood in the narrow cage, her hand clutching the strap of her bag, feeling the hard edge of the manifest pressing against her side.

She had the evidence. She had the proof. She had the legal and factual basis for exposure. There was no doubt left. No ambiguity. No room for interpretation.

The lift shuddered to a halt at the ground floor. The doors opened. The nurse at the desk looked up, her expression unchanged.

"Leaving so soon, Miss Halloway?"

"Yes," Wren said. Her voice was steady. Precise. Guarded. "I have what I came for."

She stepped out into the rain. The curtain of grey swallowed her whole. She did not open her umbrella. She let the water soak through her hair, her coat, her skin. She walked toward the station, the manifest heavy in her bag, the key heavy in her pocket, and the weight of forty-seven names heavy in her heart.

The train to Oakhaven did not leave for another hour. Wren found a bench in the waiting room, far from the other passengers, and sat down. She placed the manifest on her lap and opened it to the first page. She read the name. Arthur Gable. She read the date. October 14th. She read the fee. £18.

She closed the book. She closed her eyes. And she waited for the train to come, carrying her back to the house, to the ledger, to the silence.

Chapter 11

The house was silent, but it was not the peaceful silence of sleep. It was the heavy, suffocating quiet of a room where a storm had just passed and the air still held the electric charge of lightning. Wren stood in the centre of the hallway, her keys still clenched in her fist, the metal biting into her palm. The iron of the front door clicked shut behind her, a final, hollow sound that seemed to echo in the hollows of her ribs. She had been gone less than twelve hours. She had walked three miles to the station, taken the night train to Birmingham, spent a cold, stiff night in a third-class compartment that smelled of damp wool and unwashed bodies, and returned before dawn. And yet, the house felt different. It felt like it was holding its breath.

She did not turn on the gas lamps. The grey light of early morning was sufficient, filtering through the high windows of the hall, illuminating the dust motes that danced in the stagnant air. She moved through the house like a ghost, her footsteps muffled by the thick carpet, her hand trailing along the banister. The brass was dull. She could see it now, in the weak light—the smudges, the oxidation, the neglect. She had polished it yesterday, or was it the day before? Time had become fluid, slipping through her fingers like the ash she had held in Birmingham.

In the office, the ledger lay open on the desk. She had left it there, face up, on the page for Thomas Mercer. It looked like an accusation. The red leather cover seemed to pulse in the dim light, a wound that would not close. Wren stood before it for a long time, her hand hovering over the page, afraid to touch it, afraid not to.

She pulled the chair out and sat down. The wood scraped against the floor, a harsh, grating sound that made her jump. She looked at the entry. March 3rd. Male. Seventy-three. Natural causes. Service: Standard Cremation. Fee: £12.

Twelve pounds was what Mrs. Mercer had paid — for her husband's ashes, for the urn that sat on her mantelpiece, heavy with the weight of grief and empty of the man she had loved.

Wren closed her eyes. She tried to remember the look on Mrs. Mercer’s face when she had handed over the cheque. It had been a face of quiet dignity, of a woman who had accepted her loss with grace. She had thanked Wren. She had said that Elias would have wanted it done properly.

Elias.

Her father’s name tasted like ash in her mouth.

She opened her eyes and looked at the ledger again. The ink was black, permanent, undeniable. These were not estimates. These were records. These were facts. And the facts were lying.

She thought of the timber mill. She thought of the sacks of ash that Silas had been buying for twenty years. Fine powder, grey and tasteless, blown from the boilers of the mill that had shut down two years ago. Her father had been buying it by the sack, loading it into the urns, sealing them with wax, and handing them to the widows with a nod and a promise of eternal rest.

Forty-seven bodies.

The number echoed in her head. Forty-seven names. Forty-seven families. Forty-seven lies.

Arthur Gable rose in her mind. Then Maeve Collins. The urn in Maeve’s house, too light to be real, weighed heavily on her thoughts. She recalled Maeve’s blue eyes, wide and frightened, asking if her husband’s hands were truly inside.

"Have you checked?" Maeve had whispered. "Ever?"

Wren had not answered. She could not answer. Because the answer was no. She had never checked. She had never questioned. She had trusted her father. She had trusted the system. She had trusted the silence.

And now the silence was screaming.

She stood up abruptly, the chair falling backward with a crash. She paced the length of the office, her hands clasped behind her back, her mind racing. What was she supposed to do? What was anyone supposed to do?

If she exposed the truth, the funeral home would be ruined. The reputation of the Halloway name would be destroyed. Silas would lose everything. The town of Oakhaven, which relied on the funeral home for its employment, its economy, its sense of order, would be thrown into chaos. The mill was already gone. The town was struggling to survive. To add scandal to poverty would be to break what little remained.

But if she did nothing…

If she did nothing, she was complicit. She was continuing the lie. She was adding her name to the list of those who had profited from the dead.

She walked to the window and looked out at the street. The town was waking up. She could see the baker lighting his ovens, the smell of yeast drifting through the open window. She could see the postman making his rounds, the mailbag slung over his shoulder. Life went on, indifferent to the rot in the basement.

She thought of her mother. Her mother had died ten years ago, before the fraud had reached its peak, before Elias had become desperate. Had her mother known? Had she suspected? Or had she lived in the blissful ignorance that Wren had tried to maintain?

Her mother had been a good woman. She had believed in God, in justice, in the sanctity of the body. She would have been horrified.

Wren pressed her forehead against the cold glass. She felt tears pricking her eyes, hot and shameful. She was angry. She was angry at her father. She was angry at Silas. She was angry at herself.

Why had she not looked closer? Why had she been so blind?

Because it was easier. Because the truth was too heavy to carry. Because she had wanted to believe that her father was a good man, that he had done good work, that he had served his community with honour.

But he hadn’t. He had sold his dead. He had sold his neighbours. He had sold his soul.

And now it was hers.

The weight of it settled on her shoulders, heavy and cold. She was the keeper of the ledger. She was the heir to the sin. She was the one who had to decide what to do with it.

She turned away from the window and walked back to the desk. She picked up the ledger. It was heavier than she remembered. Heavier than paper and ink should be. It felt like lead. It felt like guilt.

She opened it to the first page. The handwriting was her father’s, precise and looped, the same handwriting she had seen on the box labels in the archive room. January 1st, 1874. Establishment of Halloway & Son. Funeral Directors and Cremators.

It started innocently enough. Standard burials. Coffins. Flowers. Fees that matched the market rate. But as she turned the pages, the entries changed. The fees remained the same, but the descriptions grew vague. Standard Cremation. Ashes returned to family. No further action required.

And then, the payments for the ash.

June 12th, 1880. Purchase of mill residue. Halloway & Son account. £5.

Five pounds for a sack of ash. Five pounds for a lie.

She flipped through the pages, faster now, her heart pounding in her chest. The numbers climbed. The years passed. The town grew. The deaths increased. And the ash flowed in, sack by sack, urn by urn, filling the void where the dead should have been.

Forty-seven.

She stopped at the last entry. October 14th, 1883. Arthur Gable. £18.

Six months ago.

Six months ago, she had stood in the parlor and watched Mrs. Gable weep over an empty urn. Six months ago, she had held the hand of a widow and promised her that her husband was at rest.

She closed the book. She set it down. She put her head in her hands and wept.

She wept for her father. She wept for the dead. She wept for the widows. She wept for herself.

The tears came slowly at first, then in a rush, hot and bitter. She cried until her throat was raw, until her eyes were swollen and her nose was running. She cried until there was nothing left.

And then, silence.

The house was quiet again. The dust motes continued their dance. The gas lamps hissed softly in their brackets. And Wren Halloway sat alone in the office, staring at the ledger, wondering if she had the strength to bear the weight of the truth.

Wren Halloway sat alone in the office, staring at the ledger, wondering if she had the strength to bear the weight of the truth.

She did not move. She did not eat. She did not drink. She simply sat, and she thought.

She thought about the town council. She thought about the magistrate. She thought about the police.

If she went to the authorities, what would happen? Would they believe her? Would they care? Or would they look at the damage, at the ruined reputation, at the economic collapse, and decide that the truth was not worth the cost?

She thought about Silas. He would beg her to stop. He would say that it was too late, that the dead should be left in peace, that the living needed stability. He would use her mother’s memory against her. He would use the town’s suffering against her. He would make her feel guilty for seeking justice.

And she would want to listen. She would want to believe him. Because it was easier. Because the truth was too heavy.

But she couldn’t.

She couldn’t go back. She couldn’t unsee what she had seen. She couldn’t unlearn what she had learned.

She stood up. Her legs were stiff, her back ached, but she stood. She walked to the door and opened it. The hallway was bright now, the morning sun pouring in through the windows, casting long rectangles of light on the floor.

She looked down the hall, towards the front door, towards the street, towards the world.

She didn’t know what she was going to do. She didn’t know if she was brave enough. But she knew one thing.

She couldn’t stay here. She couldn’t pretend anymore.

She took a deep breath. The air smelled of polish and old paper, of formaldehyde and lilies. It smelled of her father’s house. It smelled of her inheritance.

She stepped out into the hallway. She closed the door behind her. And she began to walk.

She didn’t know where she was going. But she knew she had to move. She had to think. She had to find a way to balance the scales, to weigh the destruction of the town’s economy against the violation of the dead, to find the moral crossroads that lay ahead.

And she would find it. Not today. Not tomorrow. But soon.

Because she was Wren Halloway. And she was done being silent.

The house breathed around her. The clocks ticked. The brass shone. And Wren Halloway walked out of the office, leaving the ledger behind, carrying the weight of the truth in her heart.

She went to the kitchen. She boiled the kettle. She made a cup of tea. She sat at the table and drank it slowly, watching the steam rise and dissipate.

Then she went upstairs. She went to her room. She lay down on the bed. She closed her eyes.

She did not sleep. She lay there, awake, listening to the house, listening to the town, listening to the silence.

And she waited.

Chapter 12

The Town Hall smelled of wet wool and coal dust, a combination that Wren Halloway associated with winter funerals and municipal indifference. It was a large, high-ceilinged room on the ground floor of the council building, painted in colours that had once been cheerful but had faded to a sickly, peeling yellow under the glare of gaslight. The air was thick with the murmur of two hundred people—the entire town, it seemed—pressed into wooden benches that groaned under the weight. Wren stood at the front, behind a lectern of dark, varnished oak, and felt the eyes of the community pressing against her skin like physical touches. Heavy. Suffocating.

She had arrived early, before the bells had finished their noon toll, to set the ledger on the lectern. It sat there now, a massive red-leather tome that looked absurdly out of place among the council minutes and rate books. It was a book of sins, bound in calf-skin. Her father’s handwriting filled its pages, neat and unyielding, a testament to twenty years of careful, calculated theft.

Silas stood to her left, near the door. He had dressed for the occasion in his Sunday best—a charcoal suit that fit him poorly across the shoulders, a cravat tied too tightly. He looked uncomfortable, his jaw set in a hard line, his hands clasped behind his back to hide their trembling. He had not spoken to her since they left the funeral home. He had simply waited in the carriage, staring out the window at the passing grey streets, and when she had asked him if he was ready, he had only shaken his head and muttered something about “necessary evils.”

Now, he was watching the crowd with a predatory intensity, scanning for allies, for threats, for any sign of betrayal. Wren knew he was looking for her. He was looking for the moment she would fold, the moment she would remember that he was her uncle, that he had raised her when her mother died, that he had kept the lights on when the business failed. He was waiting for her to choose blood over truth.

But Wren had already chosen.

She adjusted the microphone—though it was not a microphone, merely a speaking trumpet of brass, polished to a shine that matched the banister she had refused to polish for a week. She leaned into it. The acoustics of the hall caught her voice and amplified it, sending it rolling out over the audience like a stone dropped into a well.

“Mr. Chairman,” she said. Her voice was steady. It surprised her. She had expected it to shake, to crack under the weight of the room. But it was clear, precise, and cold. “I believe we are in order. The notice was posted. The agenda is clear.”

The Chairman, a portly man named Mr. Henderson who smelled of brandy and mint, adjusted his spectacles and peered down at her from the dais. He looked uneasy. He had not wanted this meeting. He had tried to dissuade her, suggesting that private discussions would be more appropriate, that the town did not need to be disturbed by such… unpleasant matters. But Wren had cited the Bylaws. She had quoted Section 4, Paragraph 2: Any shareholder may call for a special assembly to review matters of fiscal irregularity. She had used her father’s own legalistic language against him.

“Miss Halloway,” Henderson said, his voice booming. “Are you certain you wish to proceed? This is a serious matter. We have farmers and merchants here. Families. Perhaps—”

“I am certain,” Wren said.

She opened the ledger. The sound of the leather cover cracking was loud in the sudden silence. Two hundred heads turned. Two hundred pairs of eyes fixed on the red book.

“For the past three weeks,” Wren began, “I have been reviewing the records of Halloway & Son. As you know, my father, Elias Halloway, founded this business in 1874. He built it on a promise: that the dead would be treated with dignity, and that the living would be told the truth. Today, I intend to honour that promise.”

She paused. She looked at Silas. He was staring at her, his green eyes wide, his face drained of colour. He shook his head slightly, a desperate, silent plea. Stop, his eyes said. Please. Stop.

Wren turned her gaze from the window. She laid her fingers upon the ledger’s red leather cover, resting there until the ink dried.

“In 1882,” she said, “the business was nearly bankrupt. My father was in debt. The town was poor. The timber mill had closed, and with it, the wages of half the men in Oakhaven. My father faced a choice: he could let the business fail, and lose the home, the legacy, the livelihood of his family. Or he could find another source of income.”

She flipped a page. Then another. The sound was rhythmic, deliberate. Like a heartbeat.

“He chose the latter. He entered into an agreement with Dr. Aris Thorne of the Birmingham Medical School. An agreement that allowed Halloway & Son to sell the bodies of our deceased townspeople to the university for anatomical study.”

A murmur rippled through the crowd. It started as a low hum and grew into a roar. Wren waited for it to subside, her hand resting on the open page. She could feel the vibration of the voices through the wood of the lectern.

“Dr. Thorne provided a manifest,” Wren continued, her voice rising to compete with the noise. “A list of forty-seven names. Forty-seven people we buried. Forty-seven people who were cremated. Or so we were told.”

She looked up. She scanned the faces in the front rows. She saw Mrs. Gable, sitting next to her neighbour, her face pale, her hands clutching a handkerchief. She saw Mr. Mercer, Thomas’s son, looking confused, his brow furrowed. She saw Maeve Collins, sitting alone in the third row, her blue eyes fixed on Wren with a terrifying calm.

“Did you know?” Wren asked. She did not direct the question to anyone in particular. It hung in the air, a challenge. “Did you know that when you paid for the Standard Cremation, when you paid for the urn, when you paid for the lilies and the service and the prayer… that none of it happened? Did you know that your loved ones were not returned to you? That they were taken away? That they were dissected?”

The silence that followed was absolute. It was the silence of shock, of betrayal, of a world tilting on its axis.

Silas stepped forward. He had broken ranks. He was moving towards the front of the room, his hands raised in a placating gesture. “Ladies and gentlemen!” he called out. His voice was loud, defensive, but it lacked its usual confidence. “There has been a misunderstanding! This is a matter of private business! Miss Halloway is young, and she is grieving, and she does not understand the complexities—”

“I understand perfectly,” Wren said. She did not raise her voice. She did not need to. The brass speaking trumpet carried her words to the back of the hall. “I understand that my father sold our dead. I understand that my uncle has been managing the profits for twenty years. I understand that we have been lying to this town, to you, to yourselves, for two decades.”

She pointed to the ledger. “Every name in this book is a lie. Every fee charged is a theft. And every urn sitting on your mantelpiece is empty. Or filled with ash from the timber mill.”

A scream tore through the room. It was Mrs. Gable. She stood up, her chair scraping against the floor, her face contorted in anguish. “My Arthur!” she cried. “Where is my Arthur? Where is he?”

No one answered. No one could.

Wren felt a pang of sympathy, sharp and sudden, but she pushed it aside. Sympathy was a luxury she could not afford. Not now. Not when the truth was finally, brutally, on the table.

“He is in Birmingham,” Wren said. “Or Sheffield. Or Manchester. We do not know. The records do not specify. All we know is that he is not here. And neither are the others.”

She looked at Silas. He had stopped moving. He was standing in the aisle, surrounded by the angry mob, his face a mask of horror. He looked small. Frail. The giant who had terrified her in the archive room was gone, replaced by a frightened old man who had made a terrible mistake and hoped no one would notice.

“You helped him,” Wren said. It was not a question.

Silas opened his mouth, but no sound came out. He looked at the crowd, searching for support, for mercy, for anything. But there was nothing. Only judgment.

“I did what I had to do,” he whispered. But the acoustics of the hall caught it, and the whisper became a shout. “I did what I had to do to keep us afloat!”

“And who decided that?” Wren asked. “Who decided that our dead were worth more than our living? Who decided that their dignity was a commodity to be traded?”

Silas had no answer. He slumped against the wall, sliding down until he was sitting on the floor, his head in his hands.

Wren turned back to the crowd. She closed the ledger. The snap of the cover was final.

“I have copied the manifest,” she said. “I have sent copies to the authorities in Birmingham. To the police. To the press. This secret is no longer ours to keep. It belongs to the truth now.”

She stepped back from the lectern. She did not look at Silas. She did not look at Mrs. Gable. She looked at the door.

“I am resigning from Halloway & Son,” she said. “Effective immediately. The business will be closed. The assets will be liquidated to repay the families who were cheated. As for me…”

She paused. She felt light. Lighter than she had felt in years. The weight of the ledger was gone. The weight of the secret was gone. All that remained was the future, blank and terrifying and hers.

“As for me,” she said, “I will find a way to make it right.”

She turned and walked out of Halloway Funeral Home. She did not look back. She walked through the crowded room, past the shocked faces, past the weeping widows, past the angry men, and out into the grey afternoon light.

The air outside was cold and clean. It smelled of rain and river mud. It smelled of nothing at all.

Wren Halloway stood on the steps of the Town Hall and took a deep breath. She listened to the sounds of the town—the horses clattering on the cobblestones, the distant cry of a street vendor, the wind rustling through the bare branches of the elm trees. It was a noisy world. A messy world. A world that was broken, and would probably stay broken.

But it was honest.

For the first time in her life, Wren Halloway was honest. And it was enough.

Wren pulled her collar tight against the chill and shouldered past the gate. The grey morning swallowed the house whole, erasing the heavy history she had carried within its walls until nothing remained but the damp air and the road ahead.

Chapter 13

The last of the packing cases was loaded onto the cart before dawn. Wren watched from the upstairs window as Silas secured the ropes with hands that no longer trembled, his movements efficient and jerky, like a puppet whose strings had been cut but who continued to dance out of habit. The cart was heavy with the detritus of twenty years—brass instruments wrapped in oilcloth, stacks of velvet-lined caskets, the heavy oak desk that had belonged to her father, and the smaller, scarier boxes that contained the records from before 1882. Silas did not look up at the window. He did not acknowledge her presence. He simply worked, breathing clouds of white steam into the freezing air, while the town of Oakhaven slept beneath a blanket of hard, unforgiving frost.

By eight o’clock, the cart was gone, swallowed by the grey mist that rolled off the river, and the silence that followed was absolute. It was not the peaceful silence of a sleeping house, nor the held-breath silence of the archive room. It was the hollow, echoing silence of a vessel that had been emptied. Wren stood in the foyer, her hand resting on the banister she had polished so many times, and she felt the wood beneath her palm. It was cold. It was solid. It was the only thing that remained.

She walked slowly through the rooms, touching surfaces as she went, saying nothing. The parlour was stripped bare, the gas brackets exposed and dark, the curtains rolled and taken. The air here felt thin, stretched tight over the floorboards like skin over bone. She moved to the office. The desk was gone, leaving a faint rectangular shadow on the carpet, a ghost of the furniture that had defined her childhood. On the walls, where her father’s portraits had hung, were four squares of paler paint, brighter than the surrounding gloom. She stared at them for a long time, waiting for the grief to arrive, but it did not come. Instead, there was only a vast, terrifying lightness, as if the gravity holding her to this place had simply switched off.

She went to the kitchen. The stove was cold. The table was bare. She poured a cup of tea from the kettle she had filled herself, the water boiling with a familiar hiss that sounded absurdly cheerful in the emptiness. She sat at the table and drank it, watching the steam rise and vanish, feeling the heat travel down her throat and settle in her stomach. The weight of the heirship pressed upon her; this was the last cup of tea she would drink in this house as the heir to the Halloway funeral business, a heaviness that settled in her chest like a stone. She did not know if she would return. She did not know if she would ever come back. But for now, she sat, and she drank, and she let the silence wash over her.

On her way out, she paused at the hall table. The ledger was there, left behind in the rush—her father's large, red-leather tome, thick with twenty years of entries. She should have taken it with the desk. She should have burned it. Instead, she opened it to the page marked October 1881, the corner dog-eared from frequent use. There, next to the name Elias Thorne, was a payment for a mahogany urn, marked "delivered." Thorne had died in poverty, buried in a pine box by the parish. The lie was not just in the bodies; it was in the books. She closed the ledger, ran her thumb over the cracked leather cover, and left it exactly where she had found it. Some records, she decided, were heavier than others.

The house was quiet. The town was quiet. Wren Halloway, standing alone in the room where her father had kept his accounts, felt the first crack form in the foundation of everything she thought she knew.

It was a strange thing, to be alone in a place that had always been full of people. Not the living—though her mother had been gone ten years, and her father had been gone longer—but the dead. The dead were everywhere in the Halloway house. They were in the ledger, in the urns, in the names on the doors. They were in the very air, which always smelled faintly of formaldehyde and stale lilies, a scent that clung to the wallpaper and the curtains and the skin. Now, the dead were gone. The urns had been taken by the widows, returned to the mantelpieces of homes that would never know the truth. The bodies had been sold, scattered to the laboratories of Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool. The house was empty of its purpose. It was just a house. A large, drafty, Victorian house on the edge of town, with rotting floorboards and peeling paint and a roof that needed repairing.

Wren finished her tea. She set the cup down on the saucer. The porcelain clicked against the china, a sharp, clear sound that echoed in the empty kitchen. She stood up. She walked to the front door. She opened it.

The dawn air bit at her cheeks, sharp and unforgiving beneath a sky of uniform, leaden grey. Oakhaven lay still, the cobblestones slick with frost, save for the distant, low murmur of the river that had accompanied her for thirty-eight years. She stepped onto the porch, the wood groaning under her boots, and looked down the street. To the left, the church spire pierced the mist, a stark black silhouette; to the right, the timber mill stood silent and rusted, its brick walls stained by years of soot. Straight ahead, the road descended from the hill toward the station, leading away from Oakhaven and toward the world.

She did not know where she was going. She did not know what she would do. She only knew that she could not stay. To stay would be to honour the lie. To stay would be to become her father, and her uncle, and every man who had ever decided that the dead were more useful than the living. She pulled her coat tighter around her. She adjusted her gloves. She took a breath. The air tasted of coal smoke and damp earth. It tasted of reality.

She began to walk.

The walk to the station was short, only twenty minutes, but it felt like a journey across a country. She passed the cottages of the townspeople, their windows dark, their gardens overgrown with winter weeds. She passed the shop where she bought her lilies, the shop where she had spoken to Mrs. Gable, the shop where she had first noticed the discrepancy in the ledger. She did not look in the windows. She kept her eyes on the road ahead, on the grey cobblestones, on the white frost that crunched beneath her boots.

At the station, the platform was empty. The train was not due for another hour. She sat on a wooden bench, far from the entrance, and watched the mist swirl around the tracks. She thought of Silas. She recalled his appearance in the Town Hall: the charcoal suit straining across his chest, the cravat knotted so tightly it choked his breath, his face pale and slick with sweat as his hands trembled behind his back, eyes wide with a fear that was not for himself, but for the consequences of his actions. She remembered how he had begged her to let it go, to let the dead rest, to let the town heal. She had refused. She had chosen the truth. And now he was gone, taking his share of the profit and his share of the guilt with him. She did not hate him. She pitied him. He was a man who had built his life on a lie, and now the lie had collapsed, leaving him with nothing but the memory of what he had done.

Maeve Collins occupied her thoughts: the urn, too light to be real, resting on a mantelpiece in a cottage at the end of Bramble Lane. The question Maeve had asked lingered, soft and hesitant, trailing off into silence—Did he suffer? Wren had offered no answer. She could not. She had lied, just as her father had lied, just as Silas had lied. Now she walked away from that deception, carrying the weight of the truth in her pocket, in her mind, in her bones.

The whistle blew. The train arrived, a plume of black smoke rising into the grey sky, the wheels hissing against the tracks. Wren stood up. She adjusted her bag. She walked towards the carriage. She did not look back.

The compartment was empty. She sat by the window. She placed her hand flat against the cold glass. She watched the station platform shrink away, the benches, the lamp posts, the empty shops, the silent houses. She watched Oakhaven fade into the mist, into the grey, into the nothing. She did not cry. She did not speak. She simply watched, and she listened to the rhythm of the wheels, and she felt the vibration of the train travel up through the floor, through her boots, through her legs, into her chest.

It was a steady, mechanical sound. Indifferent. Unforgiving. Honest.

Wren Halloway watched her pale, indistinct reflection merge with the passing landscape, a ghost superimposed upon the world, and felt a cold weight settle in her chest. She knew now what awaited her: the journey home, the silence of her father’s study, and the heavy red-leather tome resting on his oak desk. She would open it, and she would finally understand the cost of their survival.

But first, she would ride the train. First, she would let the wheels click against the tracks, and the rhythm steady and mechanical and indifferent, carry her away from the house, from the town, from the name. She would ride until the mist cleared, until the sun rose, until the world was bright and harsh and real. And then, she would decide what to do with the truth.

For now, she closed her eyes. She leaned her head against the glass. She let the train take her.