Ariel stood at the edge of the town square, notebook pressed against her ribs, watching a man she didn't know tell a crowd about someone she'd been searching for. His voice carried across the morning air, certain and loud. He said the name she'd kept in her chest for three years. Blaze Furn had arrived with a bird in a gilded cage and a black dog that didn't sit like normal dogs sat. The bird wore a message tube on its leg. The dog's eyes glowed like coals in a forge. Both marked him as someone who had traveled far to say what he was saying now. He held up something dark and smooth — a heart made of black glass, cracked through the center — and told them it proved everything. That the person Ariel was looking for had chosen to disappear. That there was no thread left to follow. That anyone still searching was wasting their time on someone who didn't want to be found. Ariel's hand moved to her notebook without her meaning it to. She'd written down the last confirmed sighting forty-one days ago. She had a description of the second move and the town it led away from. She had dates that lined up in a pattern that made sense only if you believed someone was running from the wrong people, not from everyone. Blaze Furn's version had none of those details. It was clean and simple and final, the kind of story that made people nod and stop asking questions. The crowd around him was already doing it. She stepped forward. The notebook stayed in her hand where everyone could see it. She didn't know if Blaze Furn was lying or just wrong, but she knew what three years of searching looked like written down in her own handwriting, and it didn't match the story he was telling. If she wanted someone to accept her quirks — the dates, the precision, the refusal to stop — she had to show them now, out loud, in front of people who had already decided to believe him. She said his name. Then she opened the notebook to the page with the timeline and held it up so he could see she had a version too.