One ticket short
On the morning before the little theater reopened, Mara counted ninety-nine numbered admission cards and one brass button. There should have been a hundred cards in the wooden box. The button was larger than a coin, with a shallow crescent scratched into its face. It sat alone in the last compartment, as neatly placed as a reserved seat.
The cards were props for an anniversary display, not valid tickets. Mara had volunteered to arrange them beside photographs from the theater’s first season. Still, the missing card mattered: the display promised a complete set, and the opening was tomorrow. She asked Ben, the caretaker, whether someone had borrowed the last one. He shook his head and brought her the old inventory book.
The book listed the cards by their printed numbers. Beside number one hundred, someone had written a small letter C. Mara initially read it as canceled. But none of the other entries used that abbreviation, and the button looked too deliberately placed to be an accident from somebody’s pocket. Ben suggested checking the costume room, where loose buttons accumulated in jam jars.
There they found a navy coat missing one large brass button. Its remaining buttons had the same crescent pattern. Inside the collar was a stitched name: Clara. Mara looked back at the inventory mark. A letter that had seemed like a status might instead have been a person.