My sister-in-law knocked my eight-year-old daughter's homemade birthday cake into the grass, looked straight at her, and said, "Oops, it's just cake."

The diner on St. Joseph Street smelled of stale coffee, fried grease, and old vinyl booths. It was the kind of place where time seemed to have stopped twenty years ago, with amber-shaded pendant lamps hanging over tables and a jukebox humming softly in the corner. I slid into a corner booth near the back, my eyes fixed on the front door as the bell chimed with every customer who walked in.

At precisely twelve o'clock, a woman in a faded denim jacket and a black baseball cap pulled low over her forehead walked in. She scanned the room twice, her eyes locking onto mine. Without hesitation, she slid into the opposite side of the table.

"You're Heath," she said, her voice low and guarded.

"And you sent the email," I replied, keeping my hands resting flat on the table. "Who are you?"

"My name is Sarah," she said, glancing nervously toward the counter where the waitress was pouring coffee. "I used to work for Courtney. Not in her boutique—she doesn't have a storefront, as you probably know. I helped her pack and ship orders out of her garage during her peak sales months last winter."

I leaned forward. "What kind of orders?"

Sarah let out a bitter laugh, shaking her head. "Designer bags. Louis Vuitton, Gucci, Chanel. Supposedly sourced from high-end liquidation sales in Minneapolis and Chicago. That's what she told all her buyers in the Facebook group."

"And the truth?"

"The truth is she was buying wholesale knockoffs from a distributor in California for thirty-five dollars a pop," Sarah whispered, leaning across the table so her voice barely carried over the hum of the refrigerator. "Synthetic leather, cheap plastic hardware, stamped with serial numbers she generated herself using a thermal printer she bought online."

My mind flashed back to the freezer bag sitting in my fireproof box at home—the blank certificates of authenticity, the uniform serial numbers starting with *CC-8821*.

"Why are you telling me this?" I asked. "If you helped her ship them, wouldn't that make you complicit?"

"I didn't know at first!" Sarah's voice spiked slightly before she caught herself, lowering it back to a tense hiss. "I thought we were running a legitimate reseller business. But then a customer in Bismarck returned a bag because the strap snapped after two days of light use. I opened the return package and found the internal lining completely unglued. It was cheap cardboard underneath, Heath. Not canvas. Cardboard."

"Did you confront Courtney?"

"I tried to," Sarah said, her expression darkening. "She fired me on the spot. Threatened to sue me for defamation if I ever told anyone. She told me nobody would believe a part-time packer over a successful local entrepreneur backed by a respected family."

"My family," I muttered.

"Your mother thinks Courtney hung the moon," Sarah said bitterly. "And your brother Kevin... well, Kevin was the one who drove down to Denver twice a year to pick up the pallet shipments from a freight depot. He knew exactly what was in those boxes."

The room seemed to spin slightly. Kevin. My older brother, who worked as a regional logistics manager for a commercial supply company, wasn't just turning a blind eye to his wife's shady business—he was actively helping smuggle the counterfeit inventory across state lines.

"Why did Courtney freak out so badly when I put her bag in the fire?" I asked. "It was just a purse to her—or so she claimed."

Sarah stared at me as if she couldn't believe my question. "Are you kidding me? That specific bag wasn't just part of her inventory rotation. That was her personal showcase piece—the one she carried on her Facebook Live broadcasts to prove she owned genuine articles. But more importantly..." Sarah paused, her eyes narrowing. "Inside the secret lining compartment of that exact bag, she kept her master ledger."

"Her master ledger?"

"Every customer's real name, bank transfer records, fake invoice receipts, and the contact info for her California supplier," Sarah said slowly. "She used that specific bag as a mobile filing cabinet because she didn't trust leaving her paper records on a computer where they could get hacked or subpoenaed."

A cold sweat broke out across the back of my neck.

When Courtney's bag had melted in the fire pit, the exterior canvas and plastic lining had been destroyed. But the small interior zipper pocket—the one I had found the next morning—had survived in a charred, warped state.

I hadn't opened the pocket yet.

"Heath," Sarah said, reaching across the table to briefly touch my wrist. "She's suing you in small claims court for two thousand dollars because she needs to establish a paper trail proving that bag was a legitimate, high-value asset for her insurance and tax write-offs. If you produce what's left of that bag in court—or if the judge sees what's inside that interior pocket—Courtney's entire operation goes down. And Kevin goes down with her."

She pulled her hand back, slid out of the booth, and stood up.