Dawn arrived soft and stubborn. The river wore a pale skin of light, the kind that makes edges honest and everything else unsure. Gulls argued low over the pilings; a barge gasped awake upstream. The city pretended not to notice.
Leona stood at the railing with the studio key threaded around her fingers, the red cord damp from the night. The metal had cooled, but her palm still remembered its heat—the way a hand remembers a hand after the door is closed.
Caleb joined her, a paper cup in each hand. "This is the kind of coffee that forgives nothing," he said, offering one.
She took it anyway. "Forgiveness is overrated."
He leaned his elbows on the rail, shoulders relaxed but not at rest. The water ran slate gray, then silver, then a tired blue. A tug pushed past, leaving a stitched seam of wake that came to unpick itself against the rocks.
"Could have slept," he said.
"I tried." She lifted the cup. "The river knew more about that than I did."
"Me too." He breathed into his coffee and didn't drink it. "It's louder in the mornings."
"The river?"
"The questions."
They watched in companionable failure for a minute. The wind carried a damp list of smells—diesel, cold iron, wet rope, something green crushed underfoot. Under that, faint and almost sweet, that same perfume from the basement. He smelled it too; his profile shifted.
"You smell it?" she asked.
He nodded. "Cedar and lemon oil."
"Francine," she said, before she could stop her mouth. The word came out softer than she meant.
He waited.
Leona rubbed her thumb along the key's teeth. "She used to say a river keeps an archive. Not facts. Temperatures. How a laugh sits in the air. The weight of names." She smiled, quick and private. "When I was little, she'd bring me down here and say, 'Listen with your ankles. They'll tell you when the water is lying.'"
"Did it lie to you last night?"
"I don't think it knows how. People do the lying. Water just repeats the cadence of whatever moved through it."
A gull landed on the railing three posts down, stared at them like a supervisor, then hopped off. On the far bank, a billboard featuring a man with terrific teeth declared something about truth in giant letters. The river ignored him.
Caleb turned the cup lid between his fingers. "There's a story some families keep," he said, tone almost offhand. "You hear it in different cities with different names. Sometimes she's a saint, sometimes a mistake. Sometimes both. They call her the River's Daughter."
Leona's neck prickled. "I know that story. Or a version."
He glanced sideways. "Tell me yours."
"You first."
He obliged. "In my version, a girl grows up on a bend like this. The river floods and takes what it wants. She wades in to pull out what it didn't. One spring she pulls out a painting. It isn't a masterpiece. It's just… awake. She doesn't tell anyone. She dries it in a shed. Sometimes it breathes. Sometimes the shed does." He lifted a shoulder. "Then the flood comes again and takes the shed. People say they saw her walking on the water. Others say they saw her writing on it. Either way, the story keeps her name in the mouth of the river until somebody tries to sell it."
Leona felt the old ache—right behind the breastbone, bright as a small cut. "In mine," she said, "she doesn't pull anything out. She builds a frame around the water and dares it to sit still. It doesn't. She names what it does instead." A pause. "Francine liked my version better."
"Of course she did."
"Why 'of course'?"
"Because your version keeps agency in the hands of the girl."
Leona watched her breath turn to temporary smoke. The key tapped her knuckles like a little metronome. "There was a carving under the bridge near my mother's place," she said. "You had to climb the old pump-house ladder and lean out where you shouldn't. The words were rubbed down to ghosts, but I knew them: Listen, River's Daughter, don't tell the light your secrets before it earns them."
He didn't make a joke. "You shouldn't have to earn light."
"No," she said. "But you should earn trust."
A barge horn moaned. The river shrugged.
Caleb's voice lowered. "About last night."
"The initials on the stretcher bar," she said. "L. Vale."
"And the inscription on the vault frame," he added. "C. A."
She frowned. "You think someone is trying to braid us into the same rope."
"I think someone already did. We're tugging opposite ends and calling it inquiry."
"Do you believe in coincidence?"
"I believe in curators with agendas," he said. "And in people who are willing to write history if no one else will."
"And you?"
He let the cup warm his hands. "I believe in you saying no when it matters. That's rarer than a yes."
She didn't trust her throat, so she sipped coffee that didn't deserve the name.
A man in a neon vest unchained a skiff two piers over and pushed off with a practiced foot. The river received him like a letter addressed to the right place. Leona felt the city waking in its feet—the bus brakes, the roll-up doors, someone's radio promising everything at once.
"Mahmoud will want a ledger entry," Caleb said. "Soon."
"He'll get one," she said. "But not the way the Auction wants to package it."
He studied her face. "What way, then?"
"We give the ledger what belongs to it. And we give the river our witness, not our names."
"That's a very you sentence."
"Which part is the problem?"
"None. I just like recognizing you."
She gave him a look she didn't have a category for yet. His mouth didn't move, but something in his posture softened, like a room that decides to be a little warmer.
Kemi's footsteps came fast along the boardwalk. She arrived with a bag that smelled blessed and illegal. "I brought survival," she said, waving pastries. Her hair was an argument with humidity. "Also news."
"What flavor?" Caleb asked.
"The unkind kind." She handed Leona a warm paper triangle. "The Auction posted a 'clarification' at dawn. No names, but a line about an 'heir to a private archive' and an 'unauthorized opening of a submerged room.' Comments are already meat."
Leona didn't take her phone. "They want us to panic and make it easy."
"Then we won't," Kemi said, fierce. "We'll eat and pretend not to be brilliant."
Mahmoud appeared as if the boardwalk had written him into the scene—scarf neat, eyes kind, shoes that did not let puddles tell them where to put their dignity. He held up a small cloth-wrapped package. "Before you all decide to despise breakfast, a gift."
Leona unwrapped it. Inside lay a narrow wooden instrument—simple, elegant—with minute etchings along its edge. It looked like a ruler that had apprenticed to a sundial. On the back, a tiny sigil: a river line, a leaf, a flame.
"The shadow clock?" she asked.
He nodded. "Yours, for now. You'll need it when light begins to lie."
"It already does," she said, but took the instrument. It sat in her hand with the weight of a decision.
Mahmoud looked to the water the way clerks look to shelves. "We should write the Evenson line in the first ledger today," he said. "Not the story—just the witness: that the river acknowledged a ledger family. Before rumor names it."
Caleb agreed. "And we keep 'authorship' out of public teeth."
Kemi blew on a pastry and burned her tongue. "What about the breathing mirror thing? If the frame expects company at the new moon, that's… what, three nights?"
"Two," Mahmoud corrected. "If you count like the river."
Leona tucked the shadow clock into her coat. "Then today we file witness. And at dusk, we go to the pier to see if it remembers us."
"And now?" Caleb asked.
Leona looked at the water. The surface purling around the pilings. The way the wake wrote itself then forgot. The way her ankles reported that the river wanted to show her something and was being terribly patient about it.
"Now," she said, "we visit the place Francine loved when she wanted the world to be quiet."
Mahmoud knew it without her naming it. "The pump house."
Kemi groaned. "I hate nostalgia that smells like rust."
"It smells like survival," Mahmoud said gently. "Bring water."
They walked upriver along the service path. The pump house crouched like a box of old lungs, red brick chastised by ivy, iron ladder refusing to retire. A heron stood in the shallows with the confidence of a judge.
Leona paused at the ladder. Her palms remembered childhood callouses. She didn't climb. She crouched instead and put her hand to the old concrete where the river had written yesterday's shadow line. Cool. Rough. Honest.
The wind pulled at her scarf. A boatman cut his motor and drifted under the footbridge to listen to whatever the morning was telling itself. Somewhere behind them a child cried and was convinced not to, and the river took both versions without judgment.
Caleb stood a little behind her. He didn't touch her, but he believed in her spine. You could feel that kind of belief even without a hand.
"Francine told me once," Leona said, "that every good frame has a mouth you can't see. You don't hear it with your ears. You hear it here." She tapped the hollow at her throat.
He waited, because some sentences require an audience more than a reply.
"She also said the river keeps a copy of anything you tell it. Even lies. Especially vows."
"Is this where you made one?" he asked.
"I made one without knowing I did." A breath. "I promised not to leave a story in the dark just because it scared me."
"And now?"
"I'm keeping the promise."
He exhaled, a sound that could have been agreement, relief, or just air making peace with ribs. "Then I'm keeping pace."
Kemi's voice came from the steps. "Okay, poets. Logistics. We have three problems: the Auction wants our witness, the Handler wants collateral, and some ghost wants Leona to ask questions on his behalf. Oh—and we're hungry again."
Mahmoud smiled. "Two solutions: ledger first, then tea."
They headed back toward the shop. At the corner Leona stopped. The river had changed its handwriting—only a little, the way human script goes slanted when a thought arrives fast. On the surface, an oily line formed, then thinned, then formed again in three short strokes. Not pollution. Not accident.
"What do you see?" Caleb asked.
"Three marks," she said. "Like tally lines. Or a door that forgot how to be a door."
"Coordinates?" Kemi offered.
"Appointments," Mahmoud said.
They watched until the marks broke apart and drifted downstream. Leona held the shadow clock in her coat like a complicated blessing. She could feel the day tilting toward tasks—the ledger entry, the visit to the pier, the inevitable irritation of the Auction's next message.
As they reached Mahmoud's street, a van rolled slow at the curb, tinted windows pretending not to. It didn't stop. It didn't need to. The message it delivered was simple: we know how to idle.
Caleb didn't look. His posture changed by a hair—enough to say I saw. Enough to say Noted.
Mahmoud lifted the shop's shade. The brass bell made a tidy sound, the kind that makes a promise keep better than it means to.
Aya, at the counter, beamed. "You're late for being early," she said, then lowered her voice. "Someone called asking for a ledger appointment in the afternoon. They said please like the word had fees."
Mahmoud nodded. "We'll see them when we aren't here."
Leona smiled despite the knot behind her ribs. The ledger waited. So did the mirror. So did whatever part of her still answered to River's Daughter when no one else could hear.
As she stepped into the workroom, the linen strip warmed against her heart—not hot, not warning. Just present. She thought of the carving under the bridge: don't tell the light your secrets before it earns them.
"All right," she told the room. "Earn them."
From the shopfront, the street's noise thinned to a hush. Caleb stood beside her, steady as a good nail. Kemi sorted courage into piles disguised as snacks. Mahmoud opened the drawer with the first ledger.
The day had found its spine.
Outside, the river kept writing. It always would. The question was how they would read it without drowning. And for once, the answer felt less like fear and more like the beginning of a vow said properly, out loud.
"Let's enter witness," Leona said.
And the ledger turned a page.