Page 2 of Her Last Doubt

"I heard you," Paige said with a slight roll of the eyes.

"Then turn it off, please."

"I'm not even playing it that loud."

"I can hear it from here."

“It’s just on my phone…” Paige glanced at Jack, who was stirring the sauce with the focused attention of a man who knew better than to get involved. She looked back at Rachel. "It's literally just a podcast. I'm listening to it for school."

Rachel picked the knife back up. "It's not for school."

"It's for my own education."

"That's the same thing you said about the Ted Bundy documentary."

"And I learned a lot from that."

Jack made a sound that was almost a laugh and disguised it immediately as a cough. Rachel gave him a look, and he continued to stir the sauce.

"I'm not saying you can't be interested in it," Rachel said, keeping her voice even. "I'm saying I don't want it on in the background while we're making dinner."

"So I'm supposed to just sit there and do nothing?"

"You could help us cook."

Paige considered this as though Rachel had suggested she spend the evening reorganizing the attic. "I'll use headphones," she said. “Is that better?”

Rachel knew it was often wise to choose battles wisely as a parent—especially as the parent of a thirteen-year-old girl. And she also knew that Paige had picked up this morbid little interest as a direct result of her, Rachel’s, job. So instead of pushing further, she redirected.

"What's that?" she asked, pointing to the composition notebook under her arm.

Paige hesitated for just a fraction of a second. "Notes."

"Notes on the podcast."

"Yes."

Rachel opened her mouth, then closed it again. There wasn't a rule against it. That was the frustrating thing — Paige wasn't doing anything wrong. She was thirteen years old, sitting in her own living room, taking handwritten notes on a true crime podcast. There was no reasonable argument Rachel could make against it that didn't sound like the thing itself was the problem.

"Headphones," Rachel said.

Paige nodded and retreated to the living room before her mother could change her mind. She knew she’d won and she would take the little victory. A moment later, the man's voice disappeared, replaced by silence and the soft scratch of a pen on paper.

Rachel stood at the counter and stared at the baguette.

"She's fine," Jack said.

"I know she's fine."

"She's just curious."

"I know that, too." Rachel reached for the breadbasket and began loading the slices in. "She had a notebook, Jack. She was taking notes."

"Kids take notes." But she could hear the tone of doubt in his voice. In a day and age when all kids were glued to a screen, no…it wasn’t exactly normal for a kid to take notes like that.

"Not like that," she said. She couldn't fully articulate it, the thing that had unsettled her. It wasn't the subject matter, exactly; Rachel had spent the better part of two decades immersed in subject matter considerably worse than anything on a podcast. It was the focus of it. The seriousness. Paige hadn't been half-listening the way teenagers half-listened to things. She'd been working.

Jack tasted the sauce, thought about it for a moment, and reached for the salt. "She's been like this for about a year, honestly. She goes through those podcasts pretty systematically."