Page 128 of Tessa and Nash

Maeve scrolls with two fingers. The journal page fills the screen. Old handwriting, ink browned with age.

Went to Long. Didn’t want to. Pride’s a foolish thing when cattle are dying…

When she reaches the lines about the handshake, her throat works as she swallows.

When she reaches Jonah is dead, her gaze snaps up to mine.

“Oh,” she says. “Tessa. Where did you find this?”

A heat blooms in my cheeks. I’d much rather forget about all of this, but I need to be honest with Maeve. “Juniper House. I went there with Nash.”

“Whoa, really?” She pulls a face. “Then I guess we’re doing it.”

Maeve slips out from the table and heads straight for the card catalog, fingers already moving, riffling through drawers with the confidence of someone who has lived in these cabinets long enough to know which ones bite.

“We’re verifying,” she says, already pulling a card free. “Not digitized summaries. Not someone else’s interpretation. Originals. Indices. The stuff nobody bothers to argue with because it’s too boring.”

My stomach tightens.

“I already know it’s real,” I say quietly.

Maeve glances back at me, eyes sharp. “Maybe. But you need proof that your uncle can’t dismiss as unreliable. Not a journal. Not a story. Paper that went through a clerk’s hands and got stamped and shelved. You need something he can’t bulldoze.”

I swallow.

Because the worst part is… she’s right.

Thomas Long doesn’t lose arguments. He outlasts them. He exhausts them until they collapse under their own effort.

And if I walk into his office with a century-old journal, he’ll call it forged. Or incomplete. Or emotional.

Maeve pulls three index cards and lines them up on the table.

“Okay,” she murmurs. “County recorder index. Water access filings. Early township plats. We triangulate.”

We split up without discussing it… the way people do when the work matters.

I take the plats.

The map drawers resist me, wood swollen with age, and when one finally gives, it exhales dust like it’s been holding its breath for decades. The paper inside is thin, almost translucent, edges feathered. Pencil lines curl and wander, hand-drawn by someone who never imagined those lines would still be hurting people a hundred years later.

I spread one flat on the table and anchor the corners with weights.

There it is.

The creek.

The curve I know by heart now.

The winter pasture shaded faintly, almost apologetically.

Names penciled in the margins.

McCoy.

Long.

Not enemies.