Page 39 of Her Last Refuge

“I found out the Lewis family owed him money,” Rachel continued. “That part was true. But the debt came after the accident, not before. Funeral costs. Keeping the farm going while everything was settled. That’s why Farrell stepped away from them as clients. It wasn’t guilt. It was unpaid bills and a practical decision on his end.”

Paige nodded slowly. “So he’s not the one.”

“I don’t think so. Not anymore.”

The simple fact that her mother was laying the reasoning out in plain sentences, without softening it or changing the subject, landed harder than Paige expected. She felt a clean, almost embarrassing rush of pride. Her mother was speaking to her like someone who could actually follow the logic, like an adult who belonged in the conversation instead of a kid who needed protecting from it.

She tried to play it cool, not wanting to let her mom see how much this meant to her. She leaned back in the chair, crossed her arms the way she had seen people do on the true-crime shows she watched, and kept her voice even.

“That makes sense,” she said. “The timing of the debt would change everything.”

Inside, she was glowing. She wanted to grin. She wanted to say something about how good it felt to be trusted with the real version. Of course, she’d never share that. She just sat there and listened like this was ordinary. Like they were equals.

Rachel went back to the papers for a moment, rearranging two of the clippings. Paige watched her mother’s hands and was overcome with the simple reality of how much she loved her. She understood the risks her mother took every time she left the house for work. She still remembered the half year when the tumor had taken over everything—the hospital rooms, the quiet fear that lived in the house even when everyone tried to dance around it. Back then, Paige had gone to sleep every night not knowing if her mother would still be strong enough in the morning.

That fear had never fully left. It sat under ordinary days like this one like some weird monster under the bed, ready to snatch at the first ankle that walked by.

Paige agreed with everything her mother said as she walked her through her findings. She added nothing of her own, even though the theory she had been building for weeks burned on her tongue. She still believed Eve had killed their father. The old police report ledger_girl had sent her, the one that showed Victor hitting Eve when she was fourteen while Jasmine stood as witness, was the key takeaway. In Paige’s mind the rest of the story had grown clear and detailed. Eleanor had witnessed the murder. She had protected her sister by confirming the alibi that Eve was far from the farm that day and by claiming she herself had been the one to find the body. Eleanor had carried that guilt all the way to the end of her life and had finally handed the key to an FBI agent—Paige’s own mother—pointing her straight at the person responsible.

It fit neatly. Every piece of it fit.

Paige also knew that she was building the story the way the true-crime podcasts did—and that might not be the smartest move. She was connecting dots that felt right instead of dots that had been proven. That was the reason she kept the theory to herself. She was not the investigator her mother was. She was afraid that if she spoke it out loud, her mom would look at the same evidence and put a clean, logical hole straight through the center of it.

So she said nothing. She sat across the table and let her mother talk. And while she listened, she started turning over the next steps she might take on her own: another records search, another quiet message to ledger_girl, some way to place Eve at the farm on the day Victor Lewis died.

Suddenly, Rachel closed the folder she had been reading and stacked the loose pages together. She set the lockbox materials in a neat pile at the center of the table and got to her feet.

“This does all lead to one very important question,” Rachel said.

Excited, Paige said, “What?”

“Coffee or ice cream?” she asked.

“What?” Paige asked, baffled.

“It’s too stuffy in here. Let’s get out for a bit. And when we get out, would you prefer to get coffee or ice cream?”

Paige couldn’t help but smile. She didn’t even try to hide this one. And though she felt older and more accomplished than she had an hour earlier, the child in her still made the decision.

“Ice cream,” she said.

Rachel smiled once and wrapped her arm around Paige’s shoulders. They left the files where they sat and walked out of the dining room together.

Behind them the papers and the unresolved mystery remained on the table in the quiet lull of a Saturday afternoon…waiting.