Four pieces are home. One page remains. And the woman who has killed to keep it buried is the most beloved soul in town.
For five years, baker Sage Holloway-Yates has been quietly bringing a drowned crew home — recovering, one document at a time, the truth of an 1854 wage-theft that Crescent Harbor was built on and taught itself to forget. The manifest. The log. The ledger. The letters. Only the founding agreement is still missing: the single signed page that names who did it, and proves the town's finest family was in it from the first pen-stroke.
Then Sage's oldest friend finds where the last piece is hidden — and days later opens a beautiful boxed gift that nearly kills her.
The message could not be clearer. Someone gracious, adored, and utterly untouchable will do anything to keep the past in the ground. She has never once held the weapon. She has never left a mark on a courtroom floor. And she has just made her first mistake in a hundred and seventy years: this time, the victim lived.
As a patient prosecutor follows the money up the hill and a sealed box waits in a Boston vault, Sage is asked to do the one thing no one in seven generations has ever dared — sit across a kitchen table from the finest woman in Crescent Harbor, and let her know that she is, at last, seen.
The Old Agreement is the fifth and final Moonlight Harbor mystery — a warm, devastating series finale of food-chemistry clues, off-page murder, found family, and a whole town learning it is brave enough to hear the truth. In June, they'll fill a church for a wedding. Before then, the ground will give up the last of what it's holding.
Entirely free of gore. Includes Mari's brown-butter spice cake recipe. Best read after Books 1–4.
Perfect for readers who love small-town amateur sleuths, a satisfying series conclusion, culinary cozies with recipes, slow-burning found-family mysteries, and a clever heroine who keeps the names — and keeps her own face.
