Chapter 8: The Cost of Asking
Martin was waiting in the staff entrance when Emily arrived for her next shift.
He held a printed photograph of her outside the city archives.
“Are you making trouble for the foundation?” he asked.
Emily looked at the photograph.
“Who sent that to you?”
“People who care about the diner.”
“The diner has nothing to do with an old ferry station.”
“The diner leases this building from Bell Heritage.”
Emily felt the trap close around the conversation.
Martin lowered his voice.
“If you start asking questions that affect our landlord, everyone’s jobs can suffer.”
“You mean my job.”
“I mean the people who depend on you making mature choices.”
Emily thought of Noah’s tuition and the rent due in six days.
She hung her coat and picked up a clean apron.
“I will do my job,” she said.
“That is all I am asking.”
Yet Martin watched her throughout the evening as if she were a visitor he no longer trusted.
Her customers noticed the tension.
A retired teacher named Mrs. Kaplan asked why Emily had stopped smiling.
Emily said she was tired.
Mrs. Kaplan left an extra ten dollars beneath the sugar bowl with a note urging her to sleep.
On her break, Emily found a second note in her locker.
It contained one sentence printed in block letters.
“Your grandmother knew what happened to the girl.”
No signature appeared beneath it.
Emily folded the paper and slid it into her pocket.
She would have called Simon immediately, but Martin had taken her phone from the counter and locked it in his office as punishment for using it during a shift.
For the first time since Arthur returned, Emily understood that the mystery was no longer safely in the past.
Chapter 9: The Girl with the Yellow Mitten
Noah read the anonymous warning three times before looking up.
He asked Emily whether their grandmother had ever mentioned adopting a child.
Emily answered that Lillian had raised their mother and never talked about another daughter.
Noah reached for the family photograph album, the one their mother kept beneath the linen closet towels.
Most pages showed birthday parties, battered bicycles, and Christmas dinners where everyone squinted into the camera.
Near the back, a loose photograph showed Lillian standing outside the ferry station with a little girl.
The child wore one yellow mitten and held a second mitten against her chest.
Emily recognized the distinctive wooden railing from the sketch in the cookbook.
