Simone Tully's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Simone Tully had three beds made with fresh linens, a kettle warming, and no legal right to rent a single room. She stood in her front parlor and ran a hand over the quilted runner on the table. Six months of scrubbing floors and planting flowers had turned this old house into the kind of place where strangers might feel at home. She wanted that more than anything. But the town clerk's letter sat open by the lamp, and it said she could not open her doors until she proved who she was. The problem was the proof. Simone had no birth certificate. No driver's license with her real name. She had arrived in Shady Grove last spring with two suitcases and a story she changed depending on who asked. She switched on the amber lamp and spread her papers across the runner. A library card. A jam-stall receipt. A seed-shop account. Nothing with a date older than this year. Nothing the clerk would accept. Simone carried a cup of tea to the garden and sat beside the stone tortoise near the roses. She had bought the heavy thing at an estate sale her first week in town. She talked to it when she thought hard. "They want my whole life on paper," she told it. "And I left my life behind on purpose." Then she remembered something. The estate sale. The old woman's grandson had handed her a box of extra papers with the tortoise, saying he didn't want them. She had shoved the box under the porch and forgotten it. Simone knelt and dragged the box out. Inside lay yellowed deeds, tax records, and a folder of property papers for this very house. The old woman had owned it for forty years. At the bottom sat a blank witness form for residency, the kind the clerk used to confirm a person lived in town when documents were lost. The next morning Simone walked to the clerk's office with the folder and the form. She asked three neighbors to sign as witnesses first. The grocer signed. The woman who bought her jam signed. The man who fixed her bike signed. The clerk read the house deed, then the form, then Simone's hopeful face. "This isn't a birth certificate," he said. "No," Simone answered, smiling. "But it proves I live here, and three people swear to it." He stamped the residency approval. "You can take guests," he said. "But the county still has no record of a Simone Tully before this year. That gets flagged for review in sixty days." Simone walked home with the stamped paper pressed to her chest. She hung her OPEN sign that afternoon and lit the amber lamp in the window. Her first guest could arrive tonight. But sixty days hung over her like a storm. Someone in the county would soon start asking where Simone Tully came from. And she knew the honest answer would close her doors for good.