STAY IN YOUR LANE

I drove out to the Reeves place in the Flats on my own lunch hour, because officially there was no case.

Here's the thing about a scene: it talks. Most people walk into a room and see furniture. I walk into a room and see decisions — where a person sat, what they touched last, what they were and weren't afraid of. It's not magic. It's ten thousand hours of being taught to notice, and then not being able to turn it off.

Aaliyah's room told me three things in the first ninety seconds.

One: she was not a runaway. A runaway takes the charger. She takes the specific hoodie, the shoes that matter, the shoebox of things that mean something. Aaliyah's charger was still plugged in by the bed. Her savings — two hundred and eleven dollars, Denise said, from a summer job — was still folded in a sock in the drawer. Kids who run take their money. Every single time.

Two: she was careful and she was scared of something recent. Her window had a new secondary lock, the cheap kind you buy yourself and screw in without asking your mom, installed maybe in the last month. Something had made this girl want an extra lock on her own window and not want to explain why.

Three — and this is the one that turned my stomach cold — there was a flyer on her desk, under her chemistry notes, for a free after-school ride program. *Getting home safe shouldn't cost anything. — Ridgemont Community Van.* A cartoon of a smiling van. Aaliyah had circled the evening pickup times.

A girl who was scared enough to lock her own window. And a free van that picked her up in the dark.

I stood in that small, tidy, terrified room, and fourteen months of sleep fell off me like a coat.

"Mrs. Reeves," I said. "Who drives the community van?"