My mother was calling me back.
I stared at her name glowing on my phone while Fire Investigator Daniel Reyes stood beside me with the evidence bag still in his hand. The duplicate key had been made six days earlier—long after my mother supposedly gave my original key back.
I answered.
“Claire?” Her voice sounded different this time. Quieter. “Are you safe?”
I looked at Reyes.
“Why wouldn’t I be?” I asked.
She hesitated. “I heard about the fire.”
“From who?”
Another pause.
Then she said, “Your brother told me.”
Miles hadn’t answered my calls. He hadn’t even known where I was staying after the fire.
Reyes gently motioned for me to keep the call going.
I stepped away from the firefighters and asked, “Mom, when did you make a copy of my apartment key?”
Silence.
Long enough that I could hear rain ticking against the hood of a fire truck.
“I didn’t,” she finally said.
“Then why did the investigator find one inside my apartment?”
Her breathing changed.
“What investigator?”
I almost laughed, but nothing about the situation was funny.
“The fire investigator who is standing next to me.”
My mother said nothing.
Then she asked, “Claire, what exactly did he find?”
That question stopped me.
She wasn’t asking whether I was alive. She wasn’t asking whether I had somewhere to sleep. She wanted to know what the investigator had found.
Reyes noticed my expression and wrote something on his notepad.
I asked, “Why are you so worried about what he found?”
“I’m not worried,” she said too quickly. “I’m just trying to understand.”
“Then explain the key.”
She sighed.
“Claire, your grandmother’s estate has caused enough problems. You need to stop digging into things that don’t concern you.”
My stomach tightened.
The inheritance.
That was the argument that had supposedly ended with her returning my key two months earlier.
But now she was warning me not to dig.
Reyes leaned closer and quietly asked me to put the call on speaker.
I did.
My mother immediately heard him.
“Mrs. Whitman,” he said, “I’d like to ask you a few questions.”
She hung up.
For several seconds, neither of us spoke.
Then Reyes looked toward the burned building.
“We found something else,” he said.
My heart sank.
He led me around the side of the building to a section of the apartment that had suffered less damage. Inside, investigators had marked several locations with evidence numbers. The room smelled of wet ash and melted plastic.
Reyes stopped near my desk.
“This is where you kept the key she returned?”
“Yes.”
He pointed toward the drawer.
The drawer had been burned open.
Inside were scraps of paper, a melted pen, and the remains of a small wooden box where I kept family documents.
But the desk itself had another problem.
The lock had been scratched recently.
“Someone tried to get into this drawer,” Reyes said.
I stared at it.
“Why would someone do that?”
He didn’t answer.
Instead, he crouched and examined the floor beside the desk.
Then he reached beneath a warped piece of furniture and pulled out a small metal object sealed inside another evidence bag.
It was a broken piece of a key tag.
Purple plastic.
The same kind that had been attached to the duplicate key.
My hands went cold.
Reyes turned the evidence bag so I could see the underside.
There was a partial handwritten label.
Only three letters remained.
MIL.
I stared at them.
“Miles?” I whispered.
Reyes didn’t confirm it.
He didn’t need to.
My brother had refused to answer my calls.
My mother had dismissed the fire as my problem.
And now a duplicate of her old key had been made six days before the fire, while someone had apparently searched the desk where I kept the original.
But there was still one piece that didn’t fit.
If Miles had entered my apartment, why would he need my mother’s key?
Reyes seemed to be thinking the same thing.
Then his radio crackled.
He listened for several seconds before looking directly at me.
“Claire, we found where the fire started.”
I waited.
“It wasn’t near your desk.”
“Where was it?”
He looked toward the hallway.
“Your bedroom.”
My bedroom had been empty that night.
Or at least, I thought it had.
Because the last thing I remembered before leaving that Friday was my mother asking one strangely specific question in the family group chat:
What time will you be home?
I had assumed she was asking because she wanted to call me.
Now I understood why Reyes had asked about my schedule.
Someone hadn’t just needed access to my apartment.
Someone needed to know exactly when I wouldn’t be there.
And whoever made that duplicate key had planned the timing carefully.
Reyes closed his notebook.
“Don’t go home with anyone tonight,” he said. “And don’t tell your family everything we found.”
My phone vibrated again.
This time it wasn’t my mother.
It was Miles.
One message.
I opened it.
“Claire, we need to talk before Mom does something stupid.”
I read it twice.
Then a second message appeared.
“I’m coming to find you.”
I looked at Reyes.
He had already seen my face change.
“Don’t answer him,” he said.
But before I could lock the phone, another message appeared.
This one contained a photograph.
It showed my mother’s kitchen table.
And lying on that table was a second purple-tagged key.
