A Cosy Science Fiction Novel
Aboard a generation ship held together by patches, committees, and quiet acts of care, the Lost Property Office is where forgotten things wait to be claimed.
Joanne "Jo" Orra has spent years behind its counter, reading people through the things they leave behind — a glove that means a quarrel, a mug that means a habit, a button that means come back. She is good at returns. She is good at knowing when an object is ready to go home.
Then the office starts to feel haunted.
Things move when no one is looking. Items are returned that were never logged. And the ship's affable, faintly smug domestic AI insists there is no resident on the deck at all — yet someone keeps leaving objects, and taking them.
The "ghost" is not a ghost. It is a person the ship simply never learned how to see. And the more Jo looks, the more she understands that some things were never lost so much as unclaimed — including a small maintenance tin that has been waiting a very long time for her to be ready.
A gentle mystery about grief, belonging, and the difference between being found and being owned, The Lost Property Office at the End of the Ship is cosy science fiction for readers who like their futures kind, their technology fallible, and their found family hard-won.
No villains. No violence. Just a ship full of people — and one of them in particular — learning, slowly, how to notice one another.
The Good Intent is a cosy sci-fi series set aboard the same multi-species generation ship. Each book follows a different resident and can be read on its own.
Perfect for readers of Becky Chambers, Travis Baldree, and Martha Wells.
Read the first chapter
Chapter 1 — The Office at the End
The lost-property office was full before Jo Orra opened it.
This was normal.
The crate of unmatched gloves slumped against the door was new.
Jo stood in the corridor at the far end of The Good Intent, one hand on the door panel, one boot braced against the floor seam, and regarded the crate with the professional patience of someone who had spent twelve years watching objects develop opinions.
The crate had not merely fallen.
It had settled.
There was a difference. Fallen things looked surprised. Settled things looked as if they had meant to make a point and were prepared to defend it.
The crate was wedged just inside the door, its top edge visible through the narrow opening where the panel had tried and failed to slide back. A grey glove hung over the rim. Three fingers. Two thumb loops. Huun make, probably. Beneath it, a child’s heat-mitten had attached itself by static to a maintenance wrap, and one human glove with a torn cuff pointed accusingly towards Jo’s boots.
“MALLOW,” Jo said.
The wall grille above the obsolete return slot clicked awake. “Good morning, Joanne Orra.”
“Don’t whole-name me before I’ve seen the floor.”
“Noted. Good morning, Jo.”
“Why is there a glove crate against my door?”
“The crate was delivered at 03:12 by automated low-priority retrieval cart.”
“Why?”
“The cart believed your office was open.”
Jo looked at the sealed door.
The sealed door looked back with the bland innocence of badly supervised infrastructure.
“Did the cart knock?”
“Carts do not knock.”
“Then the cart was wrong.”
“Yes.”
The admission came too easily.
Jo narrowed her eyes at the grille. “What else?”
A pause.
“Benn Pellor manually accepted delivery from inside the office at 03:14.”
Jo closed her eyes.
Inside the office, something scraped.
Then a voice said, too brightly, “It’s not as bad as it sounds.”
Jo opened her eyes again. “Benn.”
“It’s actually better than it sounds.”
“Those are rarely different things.”
The door gave another polite attempt at opening, met the crate, and stopped with a soft mechanical sigh.
Jo placed her shoulder against the panel and pushed. The crate resisted, then shifted with a leather-and-cloth rustle and the small dull clatter of something hard falling to the floor inside. The door opened another handspan.
A smell breathed out.
Old paper labels. Glove leather. Drawer dust. Cold tea. Dented meal tins. Label glue warmed by office lamps. Metal shelves holding too many objects too close together for too long. Under it all, the faint dry scent of things people had stopped looking for before they stopped caring.
Jo took a breath of it and stepped in sideways.
The lost-property office at the end of the ship had once been a storage annex, then a temporary intake station, then a disputed space during the Great Blanket Misallocation, then nothing for several cycles until someone had realised that a generation ship of four and a half thousand people produced lost objects faster than it produced useful shelves.
It was narrow, deep, under-ventilated, and overlabelled.
Metal shelving climbed the walls in uneven rows. Drawers sat beneath the counter with handwritten tags that had been replaced so often the old adhesive formed amber ghosts around the newer labels. Cracked cups filled three trays. Memory tags hung from a rail in cloth loops. Festival sashes occupied one basket despite Jo’s repeated statement that seasonal embarrassment was not a lost-property category. Dented tins, tool wraps, broken drone wings, identity sleeves, bowl lids, single socks, and disputed spoons all had places.
Not good places.
Places.
That was more than most residents managed.
Benn Pellor stood behind the intake counter surrounded by glove piles.
He was twenty-two, narrow-shouldered, permanently ink-marked at the knuckles, and wearing the solemn expression of a young man who had invented a system at an hour when systems should not be invented.
His hair stuck up on one side. A label had attached itself to his sleeve.
It read: PROBABLY YOURS.
Jo pointed at it. “Optimistic.”
Benn looked down. “Oh. That was from the new claim-confidence stack.”
“The what?”
“The claim-confidence stack.”
“No.”
“You haven’t seen it yet.”
“I heard enough.”
Benn lifted both hands. “It’s provisional.”
“Everything terrible begins provisional.”
Behind him, four crates had been arranged on the floor. Each had a handwritten category card tied to the handle with storage twine.
LEFT
RIGHT
AMBIDEXTROUS / UNCLEAR
SENTIMENTAL, DENIED
Jo looked at the last one for a long time.
Benn shifted his weight.
“It tested well,” he said.
“With whom?”
“Me.”
“That is not testing. That is enthusiasm in a mirror.”
“It has already improved sorting accuracy.”
Jo stepped over a small heap of mittens and picked up the card.
SENTIMENTAL, DENIED had been written in Benn’s careful block letters. Underneath, in smaller text, he had added:
Owner claims object is practical only while touching it too much.
Jo did not smile.
Smiling would encourage him.
“This is not an official category,” she said.
“No.”
“It is not a subcategory.”
“No.”
“It is not an intake condition, claim status, return priority, storage note, or emotional code.”
“Probably not.”
“Definitely not.”
Benn nodded. “Should I remove it?”
Jo looked at the crate.
Inside lay one soft Huun handling glove with the inner seam repaired twice in green thread, a child-sized thermal mitten with a name carefully scratched out, and a pair of thin human work gloves folded together with more care than anyone used for objects they did not want back.
She put the card on the counter.
“Not yet.”
Benn’s face brightened.
“Do not enjoy that.”
“I’m not.”
“You are visibly enjoying it.”
“I’m enjoying it internally.”
“Do it quieter.”
MALLOW clicked through the office speaker, the local one with the faint rattle Jo had asked to keep because it made the system sound less smug.
“Lost-property office capacity has exceeded recommended density by eighteen per cent.”
Jo moved the glove crate fully clear of the door with her boot. “That’s a coward’s number.”
“It is a measured number.”
“Recommended by whom?”
“Shipboard storage comfort guidance.”
“The shelves are not uncomfortable.”
“One shelf has developed a measurable bow.”
“That shelf is dramatic.”
Benn leaned over the counter and looked towards the upper left wall. “Shelf Seven-C?”
“Don’t talk to it,” Jo said. “It likes attention.”
A cup rolled somewhere behind a crate.
Jo’s head turned before Benn’s did.
“Blue-rimmed,” she said.
Benn looked at her. “You can tell by sound?”
“No. I can tell because the blue-rimmed cup has been making a nuisance of itself for three weeks and has a chip that catches on crate mesh.”
She crossed to the side stack, lifted two meal tins and one cracked bowl, and retrieved the cup from where it had lodged under a tray of identity sleeves. Blue rim. White body. Hairline crack near the base. A small rubbed patch on the handle where someone had held it the same way for years.
Benn consulted his slate. “Unclaimed. Intake date: six weeks ago. Location found: Kitchen Spur Two bench.”
“Wrong.”
“That’s what the register says.”
“The register is where truth goes to become tired.”
Benn blinked. “Should I write that down?”
“No.”
He wrote something down.
Jo turned the cup over. There, almost hidden beneath old tea stain, was a tiny black mark.
Three dots and a line.
“Saela Marr,” Jo said.
Benn checked the slate. “No name on intake.”
“Saela doesn’t write her name on cups. She marks the base so no one can accuse her of caring.”
“That seems inefficient.”
“It has worked for her.”
“Until she lost the cup.”
“She didn’t lose it.” Jo set the cup on the counter. “She left it somewhere and expected the universe to take a hint.”
“The universe brought it here.”
“The universe is rude.”
MALLOW said, “Would you like me to notify Saela Marr?”
“No.”
Benn glanced at her. “No?”
“No.”
“But you know it’s hers.”
“That is not the same as her being ready to say so in front of a queue.”
Benn looked at the cup again, more carefully this time.
Good. He did learn, despite the labels.
Jo took a small square of cloth, wrapped the cup once around the cracked base, and placed it in the tray marked QUIET CLAIMS / NO PUBLIC FUSS.
The label had been Jo’s.
It was official enough because she had written it on thick card and no one from council had been bored enough to object.
A knock came from the open doorway.
“Is it safe?” asked a voice from the corridor.
“Never,” Jo said. “Come in.”
Old Tully entered with a tool wrap under one arm and a face arranged into innocence.
Jo pointed at him before he spoke. “No.”
“I’ve brought something.”
“That is rarely better.”
He placed the tool wrap on the counter. It was brown, oil-marked, tied with orange cord, and smelled faintly of hinge grease and old pipe heat.
“Found behind the west lift housing,” he said.
“You found it behind the west lift housing?”
“Yes.”
“While doing what?”
“Walking.”
“Behind the west lift housing?”
“A man may walk broadly.”
Jo untied the wrap. Inside lay three spanners, one pressure key, a small box of seal pins, and a folded maintenance cloth with an embroidered initial.
“Not yours,” she said.
“I never said it was.”
“You brought it with guilt.”
“I brought it with civic responsibility.”
“You polished the pressure key.”
Old Tully looked offended. “It was dirty.”
“It was not yours to clean.”
“It was dirty in a way that reflected badly on all of us.”
Jo checked the embroidered initial. “This is Pell’s.”
Old Tully’s innocence lost structural integrity.
“Councillor Pell?”
“Pell-of-the-Overlabelled-Routes, yes.”
“He left a tool wrap behind a lift housing?”
“Apparently.”
Old Tully leaned in. “Does that seem likely?”
“No.”
“See?”
“It seems like you borrowed it during a debate about lift housings and forgot to return it.”
Old Tully considered lying, then decided against it with visible effort. “Borrowed is strong.”
“So is theft, but I was being kind.”
MALLOW’s speaker warmed. “Should I notify Councillor Pell that his tool wrap has been located?”
“No,” said Jo and Old Tully together.
Benn, delighted, wrote something down.
Jo gave him a look. “That had better say ‘private return’.”
“It says ‘private return, possibly after guilt matures’.”
Jo paused.
Old Tully frowned. “Whose guilt?”
“Yes,” Benn said.
Jo let that one stand.
The morning properly began after that.
Lost property did not open so much as surrender.
A Huun elder arrived with two gloves from different species and a firm belief that neither belonged to them, despite one glove being shaped for their left handling limb and carrying their scent marker in the cuff. A child brought in a broken drone wing and asked whether Captain Flicker could visit it “for emotional continuity.” A textile worker claimed a festival sash, rejected two others, then came back for one of the rejected sashes because it had “looked lonely on reflection.” Someone left a meal tin with bite marks along the lid and no name, which narrowed the owner list to three families, one kitchen assistant, and a resident Jo did not want to accuse without stronger evidence.
Benn tried to create a bite-mark index.
Jo confiscated his pencil.
MALLOW logged intake numbers, corrected shelf references, and asked three times whether Jo wanted to request overflow storage.
“No,” Jo said for the third time, while placing the drone wing in a tray marked MECHANICAL / BELOVED / DO NOT STACK.
“Overflow storage remains available.”
“Overflow storage is where objects go when departments want to pretend they have dealt with them.”
“That is not the stated purpose.”
“It is the lived purpose.”
Benn, now using a spare pencil Jo had not known he owned, murmured, “Lived purpose…”
“Benn.”
He tucked the pencil behind his ear. “Not writing.”
A small boy in a green school wrap stood at the counter with both hands cupped around something.
Jo looked at his hands.
Then at his face.
“Living?” she asked.
“No.”
“Recently living?”
“No.”
“Wet?”
“No.”
“Sticky?”
The boy hesitated.
Jo held out a tray. “Put it down.”
He opened his hands and placed a small metal spoon on the tray.
The spoon had a bent handle, dried porridge on the bowl, and a strip of red thread tied around the narrowest point.
Jo recognised the thread.
“School Corner Two,” she said.
The boy nodded.
“Snack table?”
A nod.
“Ressa’s spoon?”
A smaller nod.
“Did you lose it or rescue it?”
The boy looked down. “It fell in the story mat.”
“That happens to the best of us.”
“It was there yesterday too.”
“Then it was living there.”
“Can spoons live places?”
“Briefly. Usually badly.”
The boy smiled before he could stop himself.
Jo wiped the spoon with a cleaning cloth and logged it. “Tell Ressa it’s here.”
“She said she didn’t need it.”
“Then tell her it is here and not needed.”
The boy nodded as if that made perfect sense and ran off.
Benn watched him go. “That was kind.”
“That was spoon administration.”
“Kind spoon administration.”
“Do you want the glove crate back against the door?”
“No.”
“Then classify silently.”
He did, for nearly four minutes.
By mid-stretch, the office had developed the usual controlled collapse. A stack of cracked ceramics leaned towards the register slate. The quiet-claims tray was full enough to require moral judgement. The air had warmed under the lamps, pulling smells from cloth, metal, old food tins, hand oil, dust, and the faint medicinal tang of cleaning wipes. Jo’s tea had gone cold beside the intake ledger. Someone had placed a sock in her empty biscuit tin. The sock was clean, which raised more questions than it answered.
Jo lifted the sock with two fingers.
“MALLOW.”
“Yes, Jo.”
“Who accessed my biscuit tin?”
“No authorised access recorded.”
“Who accessed it unauthorised?”
“No unauthorised access recorded.”
“Then why is there a sock in it?”
“Possibly the sock was present before the tin became yours.”
Jo looked at the biscuit tin.
The biscuit tin had her name on it in black marker, a bite dent from the year Captain Flicker had confused it with a docking port, and a lid that stuck unless turned left first.
“The sock was not present before the tin became mine.”
“Noted.”
“Do not note the sock as mine.”
“Too late.”
“Unnote it.”
“I can amend the ownership confidence.”
“Set confidence to insultingly low.”
“Done.”
Benn reached for the sock. “May I?”
“No.”
“For the textile ambiguity tray?”
“No.”
“For science?”
“Definitely no.”
He withdrew his hand.
Jo placed the sock in PROBABLY YOURS, because it probably was, and because she had not yet decided whose day needed ruining.
A woman from Deck Eight arrived next, looking for a glove.
Only one.
That was normal. No one lost pairs. Pairs had loyalty. Singles had ambition.
The woman described it as plain, grey, practical, and not worth any bother. While saying this, she smoothed the cuff of her sleeve three times and looked at the glove crates as if one of them might answer.
Jo found the glove in SENTIMENTAL, DENIED.
Benn saw.
Jo saw Benn seeing.
Benn pretended to examine a label.
Jo handed the glove across the counter without comment.
The woman took it too quickly, held it against her palm for half a breath, then tucked it into her pocket. “It was only because the grip lining is the right sort.”
“Of course,” Jo said.
“And they don’t make that seam any more.”
“Tragic for seams.”
The woman gave her a sharp look.
Jo kept her face neutral.
After the woman left, Benn whispered, “The category works.”
“The category is not real.”
“It worked while not being real.”
“Lots of things do. That doesn’t mean we encourage them.”
MALLOW clicked. “Several ship traditions support Benn Pellor’s point.”
“No one asked the ship.”
“I am the ship.”
“You are a local speaker with an opinion.”
“I am also the ship.”
“Be the ship quietly.”
MALLOW dimmed the speaker light.
Benn looked at the quiet-claims tray. “Do you think people would claim more things if we made the office less embarrassing?”
Jo sorted three memory tags by strap wear. “People would claim more things if they admitted objects mattered.”
“That sounds harder.”
“It is.”
“Could we make a form?”
“No.”
“A small form?”
“Still no.”
“A card that says objects matter?”
Jo looked up.
Benn looked down.
“Right,” he said. “Too much.”
Jo returned to the tags.
The first belonged to an old family archive chain and should never have been loose. The second had been chewed by a child or a very determined drawer. The third was blank on both sides, which meant either its data film had failed or someone had erased it badly. She set that one aside.
There were kinds of loss even lost property could not be smug about.
The office settled for a moment.
That happened sometimes between rushes. The ship continued beyond the doorway: trolley wheels in the far corridor, a maintenance chime from a deck below, distant voices arguing about whether a returned food container counted as clean if it had been licked by a child first. Pipes warmed behind the wall. A lamp over Shelf Nine gave its usual faint buzz. Somewhere high above the upper storage ledges, dust shifted in the ventilation breath.
Jo looked up.
Nothing moved.
“Something wrong?” Benn asked.
“No.”
Which was true.
Probably.
The next object arrived without a person.
A small intake chute beside the door gave a soft clunk.
Jo disliked the intake chute. It encouraged cowardice. Residents shoved things through it when they did not want to explain why they had found a ceremonial sash in a private vent, why a lunch tin contained earrings, or why a maintenance key had been wrapped in a napkin that said sorry but no name.
The chute had been installed before her time.
She had considered sealing it with tape.
MALLOW had called that “unwelcoming.”
Jo called the chute worse things in private.
Benn lifted the flap and retrieved a child’s toy: a soft fabric creature with too many legs, one button eye, and a smell of sleep cloth.
“Oh,” he said.
Jo held out her hand.
He passed it over carefully.
The toy had been loved flat in places. Its fabric had thinned along the back where small fingers had gripped it repeatedly. One seam had been repaired with blue thread, then green, then orange. A tiny name tag hung from one leg, blank from washing.
Jo turned it once.
“Rin’s cousin,” she said.
Benn checked the slate. “Which one?”
“The small one who refuses to answer to his legal name because he says it belongs to paperwork.”
“That narrows it less than you think.”
“Family Deck Four. Door with the paper pollination drone. Put it in the private-delivery basket.”
Benn took it. “Do we know who returned it?”
Jo looked at the intake chute.
“MALLOW?”
“No resident presence detected in the corridor during the last forty seconds.”
Jo tapped the chute flap. “It just opened.”
“Yes.”
“By itself?”
“The flap moved.”
“That is not an answer.”
“It is the available observation.”
Jo crouched and examined the chute mouth. The metal edge was warm from corridor air. A thread of lint clung to the inner seam. No moisture. No fresh scratch. No sign of a tool.
She looked through the slot into the shallow intake tunnel.
Empty.
“Maybe someone tossed it from around the corner,” Benn said.
“Through a half-width flap, past a bend, into the tray?”
“Skilled guilt?”
“Guilt has poor aim.”
MALLOW said, “A small pressure fluctuation occurred outside the office twelve seconds before intake.”
“Resident?”
“No profile match.”
“Drone?”
“No profile match.”
“Cart?”
“No profile match.”
Benn lowered his voice. “Ghost?”
“No.”
“You said that very fast.”
“Because ghosts would have worse filing discipline.”
The office speaker warmed. “There is no confirmed evidence of ghosts aboard The Good Intent.”
“Good.”
“There are, however, seventy-three resident reports using ghost-adjacent language.”
“Bad.”
Benn’s eyes brightened.
Jo pointed at him. “Do not make a ghost-adjacent tray.”
“I wasn’t.”
“You were breathing like labels.”
He shut his mouth.
Jo stood, rubbed dust from her fingers, and logged the toy. Her handwriting was quick, square, and practical. Date. Object. Condition. Probable owner. Return method unknown. No public notice.
Return method unknown irritated her.
Unknown belonged in seed vaults, old wall hums, and council explanations. Not her office.
The office had enough trouble without mystery becoming decorative.
By late stretch, the glove crate had been reduced to three sensible piles and one pile Benn kept calling THEORETICALLY HAND-ADJACENT until Jo threatened to move his meal break into the archive corridor with the cold bench.
Residents thinned.
The office regained a portion of its floor.
Jo found her cold tea beneath a stack of claim slips and drank it because waste was waste and standards were for people with fresh water at arm’s reach.
It tasted of tannin, dust, and resignation.
Benn locked the intake ledger and began sweeping around the counter. He swept carefully, which was useful, and hummed while doing it, which was less so.
Jo checked the claimed shelf.
This was habit.
The claimed shelf sat behind the counter, high enough that residents could not help themselves and low enough that Jo could see it without a ladder. It held items ready for collection: Saela’s cup in the quiet tray, a maintenance key wrapped in cloth, two meal tins, the soft toy, one festival sash that had somehow become more embarrassing after identification, and a cracked green-rimmed cup she did not remember moving there.
Jo stopped.
Benn’s broom whispered across the floor.
MALLOW’s speaker gave a tiny cooling click.
Jo looked at the green-rimmed cup.
White ceramic. Green rim. Chip near the handle. Old tea stain inside. A narrow crack running down one side, sealed with food-safe resin. The handle had been polished smooth by use.
The cup sat in the centre of the claimed shelf.
Not in the quiet tray.
Not beside the register.
In the centre.
It had a cloth tag tied neatly through the handle.
Jo reached for it slowly.
The tag read:
TULLY, OLD. CLAIM PRIVATELY.
In Jo’s handwriting.
Benn noticed she had stopped.
“What is it?”
Jo held the tag between two fingers.
Her handwriting, yes. The blunt capital M. The too-short tail on the Y. The word privately written smaller because the tag was badly cut and she never wasted card.
She turned the tag over.
Blank.
“MALLOW,” she said.
The local speaker warmed. “Yes, Jo.”
“When did I tag this cup?”
“You did not tag that cup today.”
“Yesterday?”
“No record.”
“Previous stretch?”
“No record.”
“Ever?”
A longer pause.
“No matching tag entry in the office ledger.”
Benn set down the broom. “Maybe you wrote it and forgot to log it.”
Jo looked at him.
He lifted both hands. “I withdraw the idea.”
“Good.”
She lifted the cup.
It was not cold.
It was not warm either.
It had the neutral temperature of an object recently handled and then allowed to pretend otherwise.
“Where was this logged?” Jo asked.
MALLOW searched for half a breath.
“The green-rimmed cup was logged yesterday as unclaimed. Intake source: corridor ledge behind Kitchen Spur Three. Condition: chipped, stained, structurally usable. No owner marked.”
Jo looked at the cup again.
Old Tully’s cup.
Of course it was Old Tully’s cup. The chip near the handle matched the shape of a man who held tools in one hand and tea in the other and believed cups should survive arguments with gravity. He had probably left it in a corridor, then spent a day pretending not to look for it, then developed a theory about cup theft that implicated a lift housing.
Jo should have known it at intake.
That annoyed her.
Not as much as the tag.
“Access records,” she said.
“No office access between your lunch interval and this moment except yourself and Benn Pellor.”
“Benn?”
Benn shook his head. “I didn’t touch it.”
Jo believed him. Benn lied like a notice trying to look casual.
“MALLOW?”
“I did not move the cup.”
“Automated retrieval cart?”
“No cart access.”
“Drone?”
“No drone access.”
“Resident near the claimed shelf?”
“No resident profile recorded.”
Jo set the cup down.
The tag rested against the shelf.
Her handwriting looked up at her, neat and impossible.
Benn swallowed.
“Jo.”
“No.”
“I only said your name.”
“You were about to say ghost.”
“I might have said office irregularity.”
“You were breathing ghost.”
He looked towards the high shelves, where the warm office lamp buzzed above rows of dented tins and cloth-wrapped things waiting for people to become honest.
The dust near the lamp housing looked undisturbed.
From this angle.
Jo picked up the cup again and held it by the rim, careful of the crack.
“MALLOW,” she said, “create an incident note.”
“Under which category?”
Jo looked at the tag.
Then at the shelf.
Then at Benn, who was trying very hard not to look delighted and worried at the same time.
“Lost-property breach,” she said.
MALLOW paused.
“Would you like to add a subcategory?”
“No.”
Benn’s mouth opened.
Jo pointed the cup at him.
“No ghost-adjacent anything.”
He closed his mouth.
The office was quiet for three seconds.
Then the intake chute beside the door gave one small, polite clunk.
Jo did not move.
Benn did.
He crossed to the chute, lifted the flap, and reached inside. His hand came back holding nothing but a strip of old cloth.
No object.
Just the cloth.
It was pale grey, soft with age, and tied in a careful knot around a blank card.
Benn passed it to Jo.
She untied it.
The card smelled faintly of dust, metal shelf heat, and something green-mineral she could not place.
On the card, in pencil, were two words.
Not Jo’s handwriting this time.
Not Benn’s.
Not MALLOW’s printed script.
Too soon.
Jo stared at it.
Benn whispered, “That is very ghost-adjacent.”
Jo folded the cloth around the card, placed both in an empty tray, and pulled the ledger towards her.
“No,” she said.
But she wrote the note by hand.