Paris, 1945. Night.
There were no sirens the night he disappeared.
Only the sound of paper burning—thin, fast, clean—and the tick of a wristwatch that had long since stopped keeping time. The ink bled before it blackened. Names curled like petals. A thumbprint dissolved in the margin.
She stood by the stove and fed each page in one by one, careful not to breathe too deeply. The ledger's spine cracked halfway through, as if flinching. She didn't pause. There was no time for doubt, and too much of it for anything else.
When the last sheet had turned to ash, she closed the lid and bolted the door. The wind outside rattled the shutters like coins in a dead man's coat.
He was gone. And now, so was his name.
But there was one thing she had not burned.
Folded inside her coat, pressed against the skin above her heart, was a single page copied in secret.
A ledger without numbers.
A name without letters.
A trail only she could read.
She left before dawn