No one offered coffee.
No one pretended this was normal.
Fire Marshal Briggs placed a sealed plastic evidence bag on the table.
Inside was an old cassette tape.
Then another bag.
Inside that was a small metal object, blackened at the edges.
A toy fire truck.
My breath caught.
“I had one like that,” I said.
My mother made a strangled sound.
“You slept with it for months.”
“I don’t remember.”
“You wouldn’t let it out of your bed after your father died.”
My father had died two years before the fire. Heart attack. Sudden. Clean. People called that kind of death merciful because it ended quickly, but they never stayed to watch what it did to the living.
Fire Marshal Briggs nodded.
“This was recovered from the alley behind your house the night of the fire. It was logged incorrectly and stored with unrelated debris. When we reopened the investigation, Caleb Turner identified it.”
