Chapter 1
Eli Mercer had been staring at the insurance forms long enough that the words had started to blur.
His office was too warm, the radiator clanking like it was trying to cough up its last breath. The November light outside was thin and watery, pushing through the blinds in pale stripes that made everything look washed out.
Toronto in late fall always felt like it was waiting for something — snow, maybe, or a break in the clouds that never came.
Back home, weather had personality. It rolled in with a roar or a whisper, fog thick enough to chew or wind sharp enough to cut. It announced itself. It told you what kind of day you were about to have.
Here, it just… hung.
Eli rubbed his thumb over his knuckles — slow, steady, grounding — and leaned back in his chair. The leather creaked under him. Another fraudulent-injury claim. Another man insisting he couldn’t lift a box while his social media showed him hauling a canoe across Algonquin Park.
“Hard tellin’, not knowin’,” Eli muttered.
The empty office did not answer.
A thin cardboard long-box sat half-hidden under his desk. He nudged it with his foot without meaning to. The comics inside shifted with a soft rustle — old paper, old ink, old habits.
There were three boxes in the office, though only one was visible if a client looked around. One under the desk. One in the closet behind old case files. One in the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet, where he kept the books he told himself he did not reread.
People who got knocked down. People who put on masks. People who made bad choices and still showed up for the next issue.
There were worse things to keep around.
He had pulled one out earlier, a battered issue ofThe Amazing Spider-Man, the cover faded and creased. It lay face-down on the corner of his desk now, half-covered by paperwork.
He shouldn’t have brought it out.
He only did that when he couldn’t sleep.
And last night, he had not slept.
Not properly.
He reached for his coffee, cold now, when the knock came.
Three quick taps. Hesitant. Not the kind of knock that belonged to someone looking for directions or trying to sell him a new phone plan.
“Come in,” he said.
The door opened slowly, like whoever was on the other side wasn’t sure they wanted to be there.
A woman stepped inside. Mid-fifties. Coat still buttoned. Hands clenched around the strap of her purse like she was holding on to something that might slip away if she loosened her grip.
Her eyes were red, but she wasn’t crying.
Not anymore.
She had passed that stage.
“Mr. Mercer?” she asked.
“That’s me.”
She closed the door behind her with a soft click, as if she were afraid something might follow her in. She hovered near the threshold, shoulders tight, gaze darting around the room like she was cataloguing exits.
Her eyes landed on the comic on his desk.
Eli slid a stack of papers over it — not out of embarrassment, exactly, but because it felt private. Like she had glimpsed something she wasn’t meant to see.
“I’m sorry,” she said quickly. “I didn’t mean to interrupt anything.”
“You’re not,” he said. “Have a seat.”
She didn’t.
She stood there, trembling just enough that he noticed. People who were truly afraid always shook in the hands first. People who were grieving shook everywhere.
“It’s my niece,” she said. “Hailey. She’s missing.”
The word landed wrong.
Missing.
It always had.
It did not sound like absence. It sounded like a door closing.
“How long?” Eli asked.
“Three days.” Her voice cracked on the last word. “The police think she ran away. But she didn’t. She wouldn’t.”
He had heard that before.
Too many times.
Parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents — all convinced their kid wasn’t the type. Sometimes they were right. Sometimes they were wrong. The trouble was that grief made the same sound either way.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “But I don’t take missing-persons cases.”
Her face fell.
Not dramatically. Just a small collapse, like a structure losing one of its supports.
“They said you used to,” she whispered.
“Used to,” Eli said. “Not anymore.”
She swallowed hard.
“I know what happened,” she said. “Back home. I know about Maeve O’Rourke.”
His jaw tightened.
The room seemed to shrink around the name.
Maeve O’Rourke had not been his friend.
That was part of the cruelty of it.
He had not grown up with her. Had not known the sound of her laugh except through stories told after she was gone. He knew her the way investigators knew the missing: school photograph, witness statements, last-known movements, favourite sweater, favourite song, the things people remembered too late and repeated too often.
She had been sixteen.
He had been RCMP.
And he had failed her anyway.
“You shouldn’t bring her into this,” he said.
“I didn’t want to,” the woman said. “I swear I didn’t. But I don’t know who else to go to. Hailey’s mother is falling apart. Kara can barely stand up straight, never mind fight the police on this. And they’re not listening. They think Hailey is just another teenager who got overwhelmed by the city.”
Eli exhaled slowly through his nose.
He had heard that line before too.
He had said it once, years ago, when he still wore a badge and believed the world made sense if you looked at it from the right angle.
“What’s your name?” he asked.
“Linda Dunn.”
“And Hailey?”
“Hailey Rowan. Seventeen.” Linda’s voice softened around the name. “She’s a good kid. Smart. Artistic. Sensitive. She wouldn’t just disappear.”
Eli rubbed his thumb over his knuckles again. Harder this time.
“Tell me about her.”
Linda blinked, surprised he had asked.
“She’s quiet. Thoughtful. Draws all the time. Sketchbooks mostly. Sometimes little stories. She likes graphic novels too, I suppose. She said regular drawings only showed one moment, and sometimes she wanted to show what happened before or after.”
Eli’s gaze dropped briefly to the covered comic on his desk.
“What kind of things did she draw?”
“Waterfront. Birds. People from behind. Normal things, I thought. But she drew them over and over. Kara said it was how Hailey processed things.”
“Kara is her mother?”
Linda nodded. “My sister.”
“Friends?”
“A few. None who’ve heard from her.”
“Boyfriend?”
“No.”
“Drugs?”
“No,” she said firmly. “She’s not that kind of kid.”
Eli almost smiled.
Not because it was funny. Because every family had a version of that sentence, and every investigator learned to distrust it without dismissing it. People were rarely one kind of anything.
“Where was she last seen?”
“Near the waterfront. She was supposed to meet a friend for coffee. She never showed.”
“The friend?”
“Waited twenty minutes. Texted her. Called twice. Nothing.”
“And the police?”
“They said she probably needed space. That teenagers do this. That she’ll come back when she’s ready.”
Something cold settled in Eli’s stomach.
It was the kind of line people used when they didn’t want to admit they were out of leads. Or when they had decided the person missing did not matter enough to keep looking properly.
Linda opened her purse with shaking fingers and pulled out a folded photograph, creased from being handled too often.
She placed it on his desk.
Hailey Rowan looked out from the picture with guarded eyes and dark hair falling across one cheek. She was holding a sketchbook against her chest like a shield.
Around her wrist was a thin bracelet — braided cord, small pale beads, one bit of blue-green glass catching the light.
“She always wore that,” Linda said.
Eli looked up.
“The bracelet?”
Linda nodded. “Sea glass. Her father gave it to her. From Nova Scotia. She said it made Toronto feel less far from the water.” Her mouth trembled. “The police didn’t care. They wrote it down like it was nothing.”
Eli looked back at the photograph.
The girl’s eyes did not look reckless.
They looked watchful.
“Was she wearing it when she disappeared?”
“She never took it off.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
Linda went still.
Then she shook her head slowly.
“I don’t know.”
Eli let the silence sit between them.
Outside, a streetcar groaned along the tracks. Somewhere below, someone laughed too loudly and the sound broke apart against the window glass.
“Please,” Linda whispered. “You’re from down home. You know how we are. We don’t ask unless we’re desperate.”
He closed his eyes for a moment.
He could almost smell salt air.
Hear gulls crying over a grey harbour.
See a search grid laid across wet ground while the tide worried at the edge of everything.
When he opened his eyes, Linda Dunn was still standing there, hope and fear tangled together in her expression.
“Tell me everything,” Eli said.
She sagged into the chair like her bones had finally given up.
“Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet.”
Eli reached for his notebook — the old one, the one he shouldn’t still use — and flipped it open to a clean page. The paper was worn at the edges, the cover creased from years of being shoved into pockets and drawers and glove compartments.
As he wrote, the comic under the paperwork shifted slightly, the corner peeking out. A bright sliver of red and blue.
He pushed it farther under the stack.
“Start from the beginning,” he said.
Linda talked.
Slowly at first, then faster, like the words had been dammed up and were finally spilling out. Eli wrote, his handwriting tight and controlled. He asked questions. She answered. He asked more. She faltered. He waited.
Hailey had been quiet since her father died.
Hailey had started drawing water even when she was nowhere near it.
Hailey had filled three sketchbooks in six months.
Hailey had been seen at the waterfront more than once.
Hailey had mentioned feeling watched near the railings, though she had laughed it off when Kara pressed her.
Hailey had kept the bracelet on through showers, sleep, school, everything.
Hailey had not come home.
When Linda finished, the room felt heavier.
Eli closed the notebook gently.
“I’ll look into it.”
Linda’s eyes filled with tears she did not let fall.
“Thank you.”
He walked her to the door. She paused before leaving, hand on the knob.
“You’ll find her,” she said.
Not a question.
A plea.
Eli did not answer.
He had learned, eventually, that promises were dangerous things. They sounded noble when you made them and turned cruel when the world refused to cooperate.
Linda left.
The door closed behind her.
The office felt too quiet. Too still.
The radiator hissed. The blinds rattled softly in a draft he could not feel.
Eli sat back down, staring at the notebook.
He read the first line he had written.
Hailey Rowan. Seventeen. Artistic. Sensitive. Missing.
Beneath it, he wrote:
Bracelet — sea glass. Always worn. Unknown if missing.
Then:
Sketchbooks — water. Repeated places. Current book?
He underlinedbraceletonce.
Then he underlinedcurrent book.
Then he flipped to the back of the notebook, to a page he had not touched in years.
A name waited there in faded ink.
Maeve O’Rourke.
Under the name, tucked into the page pocket, was a plastic sleeve.
He stared at it for a long time before taking it out.
The comic fragment inside was smaller than memory made it. Torn down one side. Salt-warped. Faded at the edges. A copy, not the original. Evidence had rules. Grief had fewer.
Three visible panels remained.
In the first, a lighthouse beam cut through storm.
In the second, a woman turned as if she had heard someone calling.
In the third, only a hand reached into empty rain.
The rest was gone.
The torn page had been found during the search for Maeve O’Rourke, caught in beach grass near the cove, not far enough from the last confirmed sighting to ignore and not close enough to prove anything. No one had ever shown it belonged to Maeve. No one had ever shown it mattered.
Eli had never been able to prove it didn’t.
That was the kind of thing that stayed with a person.
Not evidence.
Not memory.
Something in between.
A comic never showed everything. It gave you moments. Panels. Fragments. The reader’s mind did the rest.
Missing-persons files were like that too, though he had learned it too late.
Statements. Maps. Photographs. Search logs. Timelines.
Panels.
And somewhere between them, a girl disappeared.
Eli slid the torn page back into its sleeve.
Outside, the city kept moving.
Cars.
Voices.
Footsteps.
Life going on as if nothing had shifted.
But something had.
Eli felt it settle in his gut — that old, unwelcome pull.
Some fog on, he thought.
And somewhere beneath it, cold and patient and familiar, the tide was coming back in.
