Page 101 of Gave Proof Through the Night

“It’s the jack of spades,” she says accusingly. “But look, it has a bird on it. Is someone playing pranks?”

On closer inspection, the playing card looks bespoke. The bird looks like one of those nineteenth century ink drawings under the word “Jackdaw” in an old-fashioned ornamental typeface.

“That’s mine, actually.” Zoe, not looking up from her monitors. “Sorry. I found it on a windowsill over there. I remember thinking it was a weird thing to just be sitting there, but I pocketed it anyway. Then I forgot about it completely until I was getting in the shower last night and it fell out of my jeans.”

“Where’d it come from originally?” Ginger says, heating up chow mein in the microwave.

“No idea.” Zoe shrugs, entirely unbothered. “Maybe it was already here when we rented the place. People leave weird stuff behind all the time.”

I want that to be the whole explanation. I want it badly enough that I almost let it be. The loft was empty when we moved in. I remember walking through it myself, every corner, every closet. But it’s a small thing, a card, easy enough to miss in a shadow or behind a baseboard for however many tenants came before us.

“Probably,” I say, and let it go.

Dale and Tanya are gone long enough that the sun’s fully up by the time they come back. Tanya is practically glowing. Dale, on the other hand, looks like a man who just found out the sky is a different color than he thought.

“Okay,” Tanya says, holding his hand so tight her knuckles have gone pale. “So. I told him. Everything.”

“What do you mean everything?” Ginger says cautiously.

“Like… everything, everything. Starting with the accountant job. The keycards. All of it.”

The room goes very, very quiet. I catch Zoe’s eyes over the rim of her coffee cup. Alarm bells go off in my head. What now, what now, what now? And I can feel the panic settling into my chest.

Dale doesn’t say anything right away. He just looks at me for a long while with an almost pitying expression.

“Your birthright,” he says finally. “Tanya told me the whole story. That’s… that’s a wild story, Erica.”

Nobody moves. I brace for whatever comes next. Probably not a lesson on letting bygones be bygones, or something more along the lines of what Jeremiah would say. Crime doesn’t pay. One of the first things he said to me.

But while Jeremiah is a pillar of morality, Dale is more… I dunno, a golden retriever, eager to please his friends. He just takes us all in staring at him, swings his lanky arms at his sides, and says, “What can I do to help?”

Everyone’s jaw drops.

“Ever drive a getaway car?” I say, half-joking, mostly stalling while my brain catches up to what just happened.

“I have a very clean driving record,” Dale says, entirely serious. “But I’m flexible.”

Tanya beams at him like he just proposed a second time. “Isn’t he the best?”

Dale plants his hands on his hips, smiling as he bobs his head, looking around the room like he’s planning to stay a while. Then his gaze lands on the scale model of the Four Seasons.

“Nice diorama.”

“It’s a scale model, Honey Bear,” Tanya corrects him.

“Did you make that, Pop Tart?”

Tanya nods proudly.

“Incredible,” he says. “You are so talented, Sweetie-boots.”

He kisses Tanya then settles onto a stool at the counter. Tanya gets him a coffee. He takes a few sips, then gives me that derpy smile.

“I just have one question. Why was the property seized in the first place?”

So I tell him. Simple as that. How in 1951, the Armitage patriarch signed away his family’s entire fortune without knowing what he was actually signing. How the company called it "Defaulting on the loan," then seized everything down to the furniture.

“I have the public record right here,” I say, finding my huge stack of papers I’ve collected over the years. I’ve copied them in triplicate and scanned them into a digital archive of my own, but there’s something about the paper in my hands. It makes it feel more like I’m connected to the historical facts.