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I open my mouth to defend my skin elasticity, but she’s already steamrolling.

“And don’t ‘Hi, Mom’ me in that tone,” she says, her voice bright, accusatory, and at a volume that suggests she’s currently pacing a path into her living room carpet. “I saw the news alert. They said skeletal remains. Skeletal, Serena. That’s bones. Are you near the bones?”

I close my eyes, leaning my head back against the headboard and praying for the strength of a well-calcified femur. “I am always near the bones, Mother. That is quite literally my job.”

“Yes, but these bones are tragic bones. Local bones,” she insists, as if there’s a taxonomic difference I missed in grad school. “I was asking whether you are positioned safely in relation to the investigation. There is a difference,” she says crisply. “But since we are on the topic of your location, why haven’t you been by to visit?”

I rub my left temple, right where a tension headache is beginning to metastasize. Somewhere between career ambition and my various questionable attachments, I have cultivated a life where crisis is standard operating procedure and the people surrounding it have the subtlety of a blunt-force trauma.

“I haven’t visited because I’ve been working, Mom.”

“Working is not a valid excuse to neglect your mother,” she continues, her face bobbing on the screen as she presumably rounds a corner. “You can examine remains and still stop by for dinner. You require nourishment. And sleep. And supervision.”

“I am a grown adult.”

“Grown adults still dehydrate,” she says briskly, her misguided logic as inescapable as gravity. “Especially the ones who forget to eat when they’re hyper-focused. Is Tamsin with you? Hi, Tamsin!”

“Hi Serena’s mum!” Tamsin bellows, the greeting muffled by a mouthful of cheese and a complete lack of shame.

“We are hydrated,” I say, staring at the grease-spotted pizza boxes that represent my current nutritional baseline. “Thoroughly.”

“Good,” Mom says, appearing satisfied for exactly half a breath. “Because dehydration leads to poor judgment, and poor judgment leads to being interviewed on television in a wrinkled blouse. Your reputation can't afford a lack of starch, Serena. Neither can mine.”

“That is a very specific fear, Mother.”

“It’s a realistic one.” Her tone is clipped. “Now. Tell me everything.”

I exhale and shift into lecture mode before I can stop myself. It’s a reflex, really. Explaining the nuances of taphonomy to my mother is technically pointless, but it helps me sift through the evidence soup in my head. Plus, it gives us a conversational buffer that isn't my non-existent personal life.

“The remains are human. Biological sex appears to be female based on initial skeletal morphology; however, a definitive determination is deferred pending recovery of the missing remains or confirmatory DNA analysis. Current evidence is fragmentary.”

“That feels vague,” she says lightly. “I know you’re not technically supposed to give me details, but I am your mother, and I am an excellent secret keeper.”

She is an enthusiastic, high-speed processor of information. But she’s also one of the few people I can talk to without worrying she’ll reduce a tragedy to local gossip or a social media spectacle. There’s something grounding about reciting the facts to someone who loves me more than the story.

“It’s supposed to be vague.” I tap my pen against my knee in a steady, four-beat rhythm. “Vagueness is the only thing that keeps you from being proven wrong in print.”

She hums, a sound of maternal skepticism. “What about age?”

“Some of the growth plates haven’t completely fused yet, and there aren’t any obvious signs of age-related wear in the joints. I’d put them somewhere in late adolescence for now. Again. Suggestive.”

“Cause of death?”

I tilt my head, mentally scanning the fractures. “Fell from a great height? Whacked in the head with a blunt object? Fell from a great height because she was whacked in the head with a blunt object?”

She purses her lips, her pixelated face narrowing in thought. “Anything else the bones are whispering?”

“The cortical surface shows weathering patterns consistent with prolonged environmental exposure. The soil staining and lack of sun bleaching suggests a deliberate burial rather than surface deposition. There’s some root etching—nature trying to reclaim what belongs to it. Nothing that screams significant post-mortem disturbance,” I muse. “Well, aside from the person who recently decided to play amateur archaeologist and dig her up.”

“And how are you feeling...” She pauses, her voice dropping into a register that is far too gentle for her. I hate it. My mother is many things—a force of nature, a professional meddler—but she is rarely gentle. “...about it potentially being Casey?”

I wait a beat, my lungs feeling like they’ve lost a few percentage points of capacity. “It’s too early to speculate. I’ve already sent samples back to my lab for isotope analysis and DNA testing. We don’t have the personnel or equipment here to do either properly. This place is running on vibes and a centrifuge from 2003.”

The museum’s osteology lab at the Sterling-Hayes Institute is technically a research facility, not a crime lab, but my consulting agreement allows me to process evidence there as long as the chain of custody is meticulously documented. It’s not glamorous. It’s an endless trek of paperwork, double signatures, and bureaucratic red tape. But it works. More importantly, it gives me access to specialized equipment that doesn’t exist in a small-town medical examiner’s office.

“You sent bones in the mail,” she says, sounding genuinely impressed.

“I sent carefully documented, biohazard-compliant, properly packaged samples to a federally accredited lab,” I correct. “Which means now, I have to succumb to the agony of waiting.”