Chapter 29 · Second Line

"Answer her." Vale's grip didn't loosen on my hand, but his voice dropped, gravel scraping the inside of it. "Whose name."

"I don't know what she's talking about." That was true. Mostly true. My fingers were going numb where the stamp cut into both our palms, and I still couldn't feel where his heat ended and mine began — his chest a wall at my back, his mouth close enough to my ear that every word he said moved my hair.

"Ms. Holt." The woman's voice again, closer to the grille now, patient in a way that scared me more than shouting would have. "You logged a bond entry at eleven fifty-eight. One name on the first line. I need the second."

"There is no second line on a rejection stamp." I said it flat, and it was true too, except my stomach dropped anyway, because there had been a second line tonight, one I hadn't clocked as anything but procedure — a witness signature, standard for any claim filed after hours. I'd written it without thinking. I couldn't remember whose hand I'd been copying it from.

"There's always a second line," she said.