I take them. Property tax assessment for Earl’s ranch. I scan the numbers and something cold settles in my stomach.
“This is triple what it was last year,” I say.
“Triple. Out of nowhere. No improvements, no rezoning, no change in use. Just a new assessment that came in the mail two weeks after Lockhart’s first visit.” She pulls out another paper. “This one’s a letter from the county water authority questioning Earl’s water rights on the east section. Rights that have been on file since 1974. And this—” She holds up a third. “An old easement dispute. Access road along the south fence. Hasn’t been contested in forty years. Someone filed a motion to reopen it.”
I look at the papers. Look at Bex.
Her hands are steady but I can see the fatigue underneath—the bags under her eyes, the tension in her shoulders, the specific exhaustion of a woman who’s fighting on six fronts with no reinforcements.
“Lockhart,” I say.
“Has to be. The timing’s too perfect. But I can’t prove it, and even if I could, I don’t know what to do with it. I’m a farrier, Lee. I know hooves and horses and how to run a forge. I don’t know property law. I don’t know water rights. I don’t know how to fight a county assessment or an easement dispute, and Earl’s too sick to deal with it and I don’t have?—”
She stops. Presses her lips together. Won’t say the rest.
She doesn’t have anyone.
That’s what she was going to say.
She’s standing in a driveway with a stack of bureaucratic warfare in her hands and a dying man in the house and a predator circling the property, and she’s alone.
The Road Captain in me—the part that maps threats and plans routes and protects the people in his formation—clicks into gear.
“Leave these with me,” I say. I take the papers, fold them, and put them in my back pocket. “I’ll bring them to the club. We’ve got resources. People who know how to deal with this kind of thing.”
Bex stares at me.
Something shifts in her expression—surprise, maybe.
Or the cautious, careful hope of someone who’s been carrying a weight alone for so long she’d forgotten what it felt like to have someone reach for it.
“You don’t have to?—”
“Yeah. I do.” I hold her eyes. “Earl’s ranch. Rose’s ranch. Nobody’s taking it from him. Not while I’m standing.”
The words are out before I think about them, and they’re the truest thing I’ve said in years.
This land is Rose’s.
Every acre, every fence post, every blade of grass is threaded through with her memory.
Wade Lockhart can bring his casseroles and his county connections and his patient, polished pressure, and he can choke on all of it.
Earl’s ranch stays Earl’s ranch.
Bex doesn’t say thank you.
She’s not the kind of woman who thanks people for doing what they should have been doing all along.
But something in her posture changes—the rigid line of her shoulders softens by a degree.
The tension around her mouth eases.
The smallest possible relaxation, like a fist unclenching just enough to let blood flow back into the fingers.
“Okay,” she says. Quiet. Almost gentle. The most un-Bex tone I’ve heard from her since she showed up in Sharp.
“Okay.”
