Page 31 of Devoured By the Forbidden Mountain Man

When I went downstairs, he was sitting at my desk rather than his own, doing something on his laptop beneath the warmer lamp beside the window.

He looked up as soon as the door opened.

I knew from his expression that he had questions.

He closed the computer instead.

I removed my coat from the hook even though I had not needed it for the short trip down the exterior stairs and laid it over the back of the chair. My hands needed the extra second.

“Meredith knows Gavin didn’t kill Brad.”

Rex’s attention sharpened.

I sat across from him and opened my notebook.

Rather than firing questions at me, he let me tell the story in the same order it had happened.

I described the family kitchen, the children upstairs, and Meredith’s pregnancy because those things mattered to how she had talked about the past. I told him about Brad’s behavior before Halloween and the earlier time Gavin had stepped between them. Then I repeated Meredith’s account of the alley confrontation and the moment she had said Brad wasn’t finished after Gavin left.

Rex listened with one forearm resting on the desk, his gaze moving only when I turned a page in my notes.

When I reached Meredith’s unqualified answer about Gavin not killing Brad, he sat back.

“That’s different from anything she gave law enforcement or me.”

“I know. She realized it the second it came out.”

“Did she explain how she knew?”

“No. She refused to tell me what happened after Gavin left, and when I asked whether he knew what she was hiding, she said she wasn’t ready to talk about anything after he made bail.”

Rex absorbed that before reaching for Gavin’s file.

I watched him unlock the cabinet and bring the folder back to the desk. The careful, ordinary motion grounded the conversation in a way I needed.

He opened the file to the weapon summary.

“Here’s what we actually had,” he said. “Brad owned the knife, so finding his prints on it didn’t tell anyone much. Gavin admitted taking it away during the first fight, and witnesses supported that. His prints had an innocent explanation until Brad was later killed with the same weapon.”

“And no usable prints from Meredith.”

“Right, but that only meant no usable prints were recovered that tied her to the knife. It never proved she couldn’t have touched it.”

I looked at the old pages while the logic rearranged itself in my head.

The case against Gavin had always felt overwhelming because I had lived through it as a frightened twenty-one-year-old watching evidence accumulate against my brother one terrible piece at a time: the public fight, his fingerprints, Brad’s death, Gavin’s arrest, and then his disappearance.

Seen from here, those pieces were still real, but they were not necessarily the whole story.

“The missing part is what happened between the first fight and Brad being found,” I said.

Rex nodded. “Meredith’s original statement covers the first confrontation. If she withheld a second event, then everyone evaluating the case was working from an incomplete timeline.”

I traced the margin of the report without touching the text itself.

“She also knew why Gavin ran.”

“That’s the more important part for finding him.”