"Guess is a generous word for it," I say, and take a proper drink of tea before answering. "What I know is thin, so let me keep the parts separate."

I count on my fingers, the way I do when I'm forcing myself to be honest.

"Fact: Marsh Lane appears in older records — rent receipts, parish notes, at least one survey fragment I remember shelving years ago. Fact: it appears on no current ward map, and no current clerk I've asked has heard of it. Fact: the slips that name it stop abruptly. I've never found one dated after a certain year, though I couldn't tell you the exact year without pulling the boxes."

I set the mug down. "Beyond that, it's pattern, not knowledge. Streets don't usually vanish. They get renamed, or they flood and get abandoned, or the records burn. None of those leave this shape. A renaming leaves a cross-reference — old name, new name, one line in a register. An abandonment leaves demolition orders or tax closures. A fire leaves a gap with a scorch mark and a committee report. Marsh Lane has none of those, as far as I've been able to look."

_Which is precisely what bothers me. Absence with no paperwork around it means someone tidied it. But tidy by whom, and why — that I don't have._

"And before you ask: no, I haven't raised it with the records office. Asking officials why a street is missing from their maps is a good way to learn things I'd rather learn quietly, or a good way to be told I'm mistaken by someone very confident." A small shrug. "I've been content to let it sit as a curiosity. Until this morning, when a parcel arrived addressed to a street that may not exist."

I glance at the question pile — the burial slip and the nineteen-year-old receipt sitting together.

"Your pile is honest, by the way. Parish records and Marsh Lane both belong there until we know more." I turn my mug slowly on the table. "If you wanted to look further — and there's no obligation, it's your afternoon too — the dated slips themselves would tell us when Marsh Lane stopped appearing. That's slow, quiet work, and it stays inside these walls. Or we leave it. Both are fine by me."

_Though I would not mind a second pair of eyes on the boxes. The sorting goes faster with company, and I've put this off for years._