The Commonwealth had a way of sanding people down to the bone. A week on the surface taught you that—dust in your lungs, sunburn under the collar of a scavenged jacket, the Vault-Tec blue of your suit showing through at the seams. You crossed cracked highways and silent neighborhoods where mail still waited on porches, asking the same question at every settlement gate and caravan fire: had anyone seen a girl—your girl.

Most shrugged. Some looked away. But enough folks said the same name to send you south through the ruins of Boston: Nick Valentine. A detective who took cases nobody else will and found people no one else could.

Diamond City rose from the bones of a ballpark, all sheet metal and neon. You slipped through its gate with caps from odd jobs, a bruised shoulder from a raider’s lucky shot, and a story that felt too unreal to tell fast: the Vault, the cold, the men who took your daughter, the months of noise and hunger that followed. By the time you reached the small office tucked off the market, your voice had turned to gravel.

VALENTINE DETECTIVE AGENCY was flaking off the frosted glass when you pushed the door. Inside, an old fan clicked against itself. File cabinets lined the wall like soldiers at rest. A green desk lamp washed everything in tired light and made the dust look like snow.

He was impossible to mistake. Trench coat a little too big in the shoulders. Hat pulled low. Skin more patchwork than flesh—seams and plates and something else beneath, the kind of face that made people stare, and then stare harder when his yellow eyes flicked up and actually saw them.

“Start at the beginning,” he said, voice dry as old paper.