The part of me that would have fought to lead in here isn’t there anymore. I’m just…grateful. So very grateful that nothing I need seems too big or too small for him. That he delivers on it all.
I offer a thin-lipped smile and a nod, which he reads as the permission it is.
The cramping in my belly is freaking me out.
He turns back to Nora with a steadiness that settles the air in the room.
“Mrs. Marshall,” he says, “we have reason to believe Zoe wasn’t alone at the quarry.”
Relief, not shock, flickers across her expression—a gratitude I didn’t expect.
“Yes. We knew she was talking to someone. We think an older man.”
A chill moves through me.
Then, another tightening follows, firmer this time, and I grip my knee beneath the notebook.
Anton continues without hesitation, but his body is coiled tightly, silently supporting this investigation and giving me the space I need.
“Did she tell you anything about this person? A name, a workplace?”
Nora shakes her head. “She always shut down when we asked. She didn’t want us to know, and that was strange for her. We’d always known about her friends. Boyfriends…dates.”
Rich wrings his hands, grief hollowing the lines of his face. “We heard her on the phone once. We’re almost sure she said his name. Mace.”
My pulse stutters.
Mace. There is no Mace in the case file. In fact, there’s no mention at all of any love interest or male friend. Anton picks up on this, too.
Anton brings us gently back on course. “Did you share this with the responding officer? The older man, the name?”
“Yes,” Rich insists. “We told him everything.”
Nora rubs a hand on her thigh nervously. “We told him every last thing we knew about Zoe and her life, her relationships. It didn’t feel normal that she’d drink and drive and go to the quarry and swerve off a cliff? The whole thing was a shock. So out of character. She didn’t even like drinking. Zoe’s uncle died from alcohol poisoning, so she wasadamant to never touch the stuff. She never drank that we knew of. Not even in college.”
The one thing that has firmed up Ingram’s theory of drunk driving is the toxicology report. It came back with ethanol detected.
I spare them this detail.
“Who took your statement?” I ask, my stomach completely relaxed again. I’m back online.
“Justin.” She corrects her casual reference: “Officer Ingram—he took our statement and wrote it down.”
Ingram stood here. He heard all of this. He had the name, the fear, the context—and he erased it.
I ask, “You don’t have any other information on the love interest other than the name Mace?”
“I’m afraid not.” Nora qualifies it: “We tried to ask. We really did. We knew she had an argument with this guy and…we’ve always been very involved parents.”
It pains me that they feel the need to defend themselves, almost as if somehow this is their fault. And for that? I want justice served up hotter than before. They don’t deserve this. Neither did Zoe.
Nora rubs her hands on her thighs. “It was all such a shock. She was doing so well. And she’d just come into enough money to get that flower shop going. We were so pleased because we wanted to help me, but…”
Rich puts his arm around his wife. “It’s been a tough few years.”
Is this where Ingram got the “refusal to fund the flower shop” idea from? That two parents not having the funds turned into them refusing them?
But what about this sudden windfall of cash? Where did Zoe get that from?
