Page 4 of Her Last Farewell

Rachel sat up, sheets pooling around her waist as her bare feet found the cool hardwood floor. "A single body in the woods?” she asked, puzzled. “Why are we being called in?"

"Because the victim has been identified as Carla Rhodes." Anderson paused, letting the name settle. "She's been missing for nearly five months. When she disappeared, local PD found a suicide note in her apartment, but no body. Now she shows up dead in the woods?"

“Recently deceased?”

“Looks that way, from what I can tell.”

Rachel was already moving to her closet, pulling out the dark pantsuit she'd hung there the night before. Even during her illness, she'd maintained the habit of laying out her clothes – as if preparing for tomorrow meant she'd definitely see it. She quickly shed her pajamas, the air cool against her skin as she dressed quickly.

"I want you and Novak at the scene," Anderson continued. "I'll text you the coordinates. Local PD is securing the area, but this one feels off. I need your eyes on it."

"We're on it," Rachel said, buttoning her blouse with one hand while holding the phone with the other. "I'll head to the office now."

The call ended, and Rachel moved around the room, gathering her things. Her shoulder holster went on next, the familiar weight of her service weapon settling against her ribs. She caught her reflection in the mirror – even after all this time, sometimes she still expected to see the gaunt, pale face from her cancer days. But no, her cheeks had color now, her eyes were bright and alert. She quickly ran a brush through her hair, securing it back in a neat ponytail.

As she headed for the bathroom, Jack's sleepy voice drifted from their bed.

"You got a case?"

She turned to look at him, his face half-buried in his pillow, dark hair tousled from sleep. These moments – these small, domestic scenes – still felt like gifts after everything they'd been through. After all the times, she'd thought she might never have mornings like this again.

"Yeah, and it sounds like a big one," she said, pausing in the bathroom doorway. "In the forests near Bowery. I need to get out of here ASAP. Can you make sure Paige eats something other than a Pop Tart for breakfast?"

Jack's response was a mix between a grunt and a chuckle. "You mean I shouldn't let our pre-teen subsist entirely on processed sugar? Such a demanding wife."

Rachel crossed back to the bed, leaning down to kiss his cheek. His morning stubble scratched against her lips, and she wrinkled her nose at the sandpaper-like feel of it.

"Have a good day pushing papers, Assistant Director," she teased, using his new title.

"Have fun playing in the woods, Special Agent," he mumbled back, already drifting back to sleep. "Stay safe."

As she brushed her teeth, Rachel's mind was already working through the preliminary details. A suicide note but no body, then the body shows up five months later, recently deceased? Something wasn't adding up. Her investigator's instincts, dormant for so long during her illness, were humming back to life. And she’d been finding over the past few weeks that they seemed to be sharper than ever.

Rachel moved quietly down the stairs, mindful of Paige's room just down the hall. She paused briefly outside her daughter's door. A familiar ache tugged at her heart – another morning she'd miss breakfast with her daughter, another day starting with an empty goodbye. Even though Paige was older now and understood her mother's job, these early morningdepartures never got easier. Rachel made a mental note to text her later, maybe suggest ice cream whenever she got back home to make up for the missed morning.

The house was still and peaceful, wrapped in that peculiar pre-dawn quiet that made everything feel slightly surreal. In the kitchen, she grabbed a banana and a protein bar from the cabinet. The kitchen still held the lingering scent of last night's taco dinner.

As she reached for her coat by the front door, her phone buzzed with a text from Novak. She couldn't help but smile slightly as she read it, finding him just as eager as usual:Already headed to the office when Anderson called. Car will be ready when you arrive.

Rachel found herself reflecting on her partnership with Novak as she stepped out into the crisp morning air. When Jack had taken the promotion to Assistant Director, she'd resented being assigned a new partner. She'd worked with Jack for so long that anyone else would have felt wrong. And Novak, with his methodical approach and sometimes irritating attention to minor details, had initially driven her crazy.

But over the past few months, she'd begun to appreciate those very qualities she'd once found frustrating. Novak's thoroughness meant she never had to worry about overlooked details. His sometimes rigid adherence to procedure balanced her occasional tendency to follow hunches. He was always prepared, always punctual, always thinking three steps ahead – like having the car ready before she even reached the office.

Yes, he still had quirks that got under her skin – his habit of humming while reviewing case files, the way he organized and reorganized his desk multiple times a day, his inexplicable preference for manual transmissions when automatic was clearly superior for surveillance work. And his need to alwaysfill tense silences with idle chit-chat. But those quirks were becoming familiar, almost endearing in their predictability.

As Rachel climbed into her car and started the engine, she felt that spark of excitement again – the one that had drawn her to the FBI in the first place. A body in the woods, a missing woman, a mysterious suicide note that didn't add up. Her mind was already spinning through possibilities, connecting dots that might not even exist yet. This was what she'd missed during her long recovery: the thrill of the hunt, the satisfaction of bringing order to chaos, the chance to speak for those who could no longer speak for themselves.

The eastern sky was beginning to brighten as she pulled out of her driveway, painting the clouds in shades of pink and gold. But Rachel's thoughts were already in darker places, wondering what waited for them in those woods outside Bowery. A five-month-old missing person’s case had suddenly become active again, and something about it felt wrong. Why would someone write a suicide note and then turn up murdered? What had happened to Carla Rhodes in those missing months?

Rachel knew from experience that cases like this – the ones that seemed wrong from the very beginning – usually turned out to be far more complex than they initially appeared. As she merged onto the highway toward the office where Novak would be waiting with their vehicle, she was already starting to feel that this might be one of those cases that proved to be much more complex than it initially seemed.

CHAPTER FOUR

The morning had warmed a bit when Rachel and Novak pulled up to the coordinates Director Anderson had provided, though not by much. The little dashboard thermometer read 39 as they parked—not unseasonably cold for southern Virginia in November, but cold all the same. They’d been driving along two-lane back roads for the last fifteen minutes, and the final road that brought them to the coordinates was little more than a thin strip of cracked asphalt cutting through the Virginia wilderness, barely wide enough for two vehicles to pass each other. A small gravel pull-off area had been carved into the shoulder, where three police cruisers now sat with their lights silently flashing, casting eerie rotating patterns through the bare November trees.

Rachel stepped out of their vehicle, her shoes crunching on the loose gravel. The air held the sharp bite of approaching winter, and the wind whipped dead leaves across the ground in sporadic gusts. She pulled her coat tighter around herself as she noticed an officer approaching them right away—a large, African American man. The lapel on his coat indicated he was a deputy.

“Agents?” he asked.

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