I couldn’t go to Dex with this. Dex would tell me to stay out of it, to protect the brand, to let Rose handle her own business. And maybe he’d be right about the last part, but he’d be right for the wrong reasons.
I needed someone who thought in systems. Someone who could look at the fragments I’d overheard and see where they fit in a larger pattern.
I needed Olivia.
I found her in the main house, tucked into the corner of the lounge with her laptop and a cup of tea that had probably gone cold an hour ago. Olivia existed in a state of permanent productivity. Even on a ranch retreat supposedly designed for unplugging, she’d carved out a workspace and was running reports.
“Got a minute?” I asked.
She glanced up, took one look at my face, and closed the laptop.
“Sit down,” she said.
I sat across from her at the dining table and rubbed a hand over my jaw, trying to figure out where to start.
“This stays between us,” I said. “Not Dex, not Jamie. Nobody.”
Olivia’s expression didn’t change. That was one of the things I valued about her. Ten years she’d worked for me, first as a production assistant, then coordinator, then operations manager. She’d held the business together through two rebrandings, a tax audit, and the Natasha fallout. Nothing rattled her.
“What’s going on?” she asked.
I told her about Denise.
All of it. The phone call I’d overheard a week ago through the cracked office door, the fragments that had burrowed into my brain and wouldn’t let go. Rose mentioning a fencing company called Ridgeline Supply that had charged twelve thousand for an eighty-five-hundred-dollar job, and Denise brushing it off as a rush surcharge.
Olivia listened without interrupting. Her eyes narrowed exactly once, when I mentioned the markup, and I watched her brain switch into the mode I’d seen a hundred times before. The mode where numbers became a story.
“A forty percent surcharge on fencing materials,” she repeated quietly. “That’s not a rush fee. That’s margin.”
“That’s what I thought.”
“How long has Denise been managing the ranch finances?”
“Since the beginning from what Rose has said.”
Olivia was quiet for a moment, her fingers tapping a rhythm on the table that meant she was running calculations I couldn’t see.
“If she’s inflating vendor invoices by even twenty percent across the board, supplies, feed, equipment, maintenance, on a property this size, you’re talking about tens of thousands a year. Over six years?” She shook her head slowly. “That’s not petty theft, Graham. That’s systematic.”
“I know.”
“Have you told Rose what you overheard?”
“No.”
She studied me. “Why not?”
“Because right now I’ve got a phone call and a gut feeling. Rose trusts Denise more than she trusts me. More than she trusts anyone. If I go to her with suspicion and no proof, she’ll defend Denise and throw me out. And she’d be right to, because I’m the one who’s been lying to her about who I am.”
Olivia’s expression shifted. The look of someone who understood the math of the situation and didn’t like the answer.
“You need proof,” she said.
“Aye.”
She pulled the laptop back toward her and opened it. “I can start looking. Public records, Colorado Secretary of State business filings, vendor registrations. If someone’s set up shell companies to funnel ranch payments through, there might be a paper trail.”
“Can you do that without raising flags?”
