Playa smelled like old summers and new rot. The waves beat a hollow time against the broken seawall, coughing glass and driftwood out of the surf and spitting them across the sand. We followed Lenore’s spoor not by footsteps—she moved in a way meant to confuse tracks—but by the small things she left: a curl of black ribbon snagged on a rusted lamppost, a smear of violet paint along a stair handrail, the faint, oily scent of pipe-smoke that her people liked to mask themselves
