The Shop on Miller Street
The shop was smaller than she expected, warm light through a dusty window, a bell over the door that rang thin and off-key when she pushed it open at nine the next morning.
A man looked up from a workbench cluttered with disassembled clock parts — silver threading through dark hair, sleeves rolled to the elbow, hands stained with the particular black of old machine oil.
"We open at nine," he said. "You're early."
"I know. Sorry." Priya's carefully rehearsed opening line evaporated somewhere between the doorway and the counter. "Are you Corwin Hale?"
Something shifted behind his eyes — small, quickly smoothed over, the practiced stillness of a man who'd learned not to react. "Depends who's asking."
"My name's Priya. I'm an intern. At Voss Dynamics."
The stillness cracked.
"Then you're in the wrong shop," he said, already turning back to the clock in front of him, tone gone flat and final. "I don't do work for corporate accounts."
"I found something in the archive." She kept her voice steady, the way she'd practiced on the train. "A share transfer. Your name's on the company history, except it isn't — it's been scrubbed out everywhere except one sealed box nobody's opened in twenty years."
His hands had stopped moving.
"I found letters too," she said. "Eleven of them. Never sent."
The screwdriver in his hand set itself down against the counter, very carefully, like he didn't trust himself with it anymore.
"Get out," he said, quiet.
"Mr. Hale—"
"I said get out." He wasn't looking at her now, he was looking at the door behind her, like he expected someone else to walk through it. "Whatever you found, whatever you think you know — put it back where you found it and forget you ever opened that box."
Priya didn't move.
"Someone already knows I took it," she said. "I got a message this morning. From building security."
That made him look up.
"What message?"
She pulled out her phone, hand not quite steady, and turned the screen toward him — a single line from an unknown internal number, sent at 6:14 that morning: We know what's missing from archive room B. Return it before this becomes a problem for both of us.