“You remember that?” Nash looked pleased.
“I remember a lot about those days,” Sadie admitted. More than she’d allowed herself to think about in years. “So your debate skills led to law?”
Nash nodded. “That, and I wanted to do something different. Forge my own path. Don’t get me wrong—I love the ranch, and I go back as often as I can. But I needed to prove I could make it on my own terms.”
“I understand that.” In her case, she’d had no choice but to forge a new path. Her old one had been obliterated the night her father was killed.
They ate in companionable silence for a moment, the country music from the other room providing a gentle backdrop.
He grinned. “Now Cheyenne’s becoming an attorney as well.”
“Really?” Sadie let out a low laugh. “I saw that she married Micah Stone last year?”
He cocked an eyebrow.
She knew she was blushing. “Hey, I was researching your family last night and I found a bunch of stuff online.”
Nash nodded. “That was definitely reported in the Cross Creek paper. Probably in the national paper too, because so much of the Stone family has received attention with the gold hunt.”
She nodded. “Yes. But it appears all of your siblings are married.”
He rolled his eyes. “Don’t remind me. I never hear the end of it. ‘Nash, when is it your turn?’”
For some reason, the way he looked at her madeherblush. “That must be hard.”
“You have no idea.” He cocked an eyebrow. “What about you? Is marriage in the cards?”
“Well, until my mother passed, she pressured me nonstop. But after she passed, my studies felt … safe. Concrete. A subject where the facts don’t change, even when everything else does.” She pushed a strawberry around her plate. “Unlike dating.”
“That makes sense.” He cocked an eyebrow. “It feels strange to me that your mother wanted you to have someone, even though there was all of the witness protection stuff.”
She nodded. “Especially because of that. She truly wanted me to find someone I could be close to and share everything with.” She shrugged. “But it was hard for me. I dated a bit, but it was just easier to get lost in school and then my research.”
“I get it,” Nash said. “I always joke that I have enough people bugging me in my family. The law is safe; it doesn’t talk back.”
She laughed. “Exactly.”
Nash set down his fork. “So how did Sadie Blair, witness protection edition, end up specializing in the Rockwell gold?”
Sadie considered how much to reveal. She took a sip of water, choosing her words carefully. “I started taking classes at the U, just to have something to do. There was this professor—Elaine Matthews—who taught Utah History. She was brilliant, passionate. She made these long-dead figures seem alive. I got hooked. Porter Rockwell was easy to get hooked on. He’s fascinating.”
“How so?”
“He’s this complex, controversial figure who was fiercely loyal to his people but had a reputation for violence. A man surrounded by myths and secrets.” She smiled faintly. “I wrote my undergraduate thesis on him. That’s when I first started hearing whispers about the gold.”
“From Bill Harris?”
Sadie shook her head. “Not then. Bill came later, after I’d already been researching Rockwell for years. I met him at a historical society event about four months ago. He approached me after my presentation on Rockwell’s connections to early mining operations.”
She remembered that night clearly—Bill’s enthusiastic questions, his barely contained excitement when she’dmentioned the broken arrow symbol. “He said he had discovered something that would change our understanding of Rockwell’s activities,” Sadie continued. “He was particularly interested in the broken arrow symbol and its connection to hidden caches throughout Utah Territory.”
“The same symbol that’s in the cave where we met,” Nash noted.
“And on the missile silos on your ranch,” Sadie added.
Nash raised an eyebrow but didn’t comment on her slip. “Right. What exactly was Bill’s theory about the gold?”
Sadie hesitated. “Like I mentioned, he believed Rockwell was part of a network. People who were tasked with hiding valuable items—not just gold, but documents, weapons, artifacts that the early Mormon church wanted to protect from the federal government. The broken arrow was their marker system.”
