Later, a van with tinted windows had joined him, parked on the shoulder a hundred meters down the road. The photographer next to it did not look like he was there for love.
“Maybe we shouldn’t have tagged Gracen Ranch in all the new videos,” Jamie said, staring through the kitchen window.
“That was the whole plan,” Dex said. He was at the table, laptop open, scrolling through social media feeds. “Tag the ranch so the new content buries the first video. Drive searches toward Fraser Kincaid with horses instead of the barn footage with Rose.” He looked up. “Nothing we can change now. They’re here.”
It mattered. Not the how. The what. What it was doing to Rose.
I found her coming out of her office. Her face was the mask I hadn’t seen since the first week. Controlled, distant, every emotion locked down tight.
“Two more cancellations for next month came in by email,” she said. “The Feldmans and the Morrison party. Both citing ‘changed circumstances.’”
Changed circumstances. Polite language foryour ranch is a circus and we’d rather not.
Two bookings gone. Probably twenty-five thousand in revenue wiped out overnight. On top of seventy-two thousand stolen. On top of an insurance crisis.
Partly because of me.
My name. My face. My fifty million followers who thought they owned a piece of every place I’d ever stood.
“Graham.” Dex’s voice, low enough that only I could hear. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Whatever you’re doing in your head right now. The guilt spiral. The ‘this is all my fault’ calculation. Don’t.”
“Itismy fault. Every photographer out there is here because of me.”
“They’re here because they found our location. That’s not the same thing.”
Dex was right about the guilt spiral. He was wrong about it not being my fault. But standing in the kitchen arguing about it wasn’t going to help Rose, and it wasn’t going to answer thequestion that had been gnawing at me since the insurance lapsed with a little too much convenience.
I helped Hank replace a gate hinge after breakfast, then went looking for Olivia.
I found her in her cabin, laptop open on the small desk alongside a legal pad covered in her handwriting. She’d turned the space into a quiet command center. Printouts from the Colorado Secretary of State’s business registry fanned across the bed, cross-referenced with notes I couldn’t read from the doorway.
She looked up when I knocked.
“Close the door,” she said.
I did. Leaned against it. “Something doesn’t fit.”
“Sit down first.”
I sat on the edge of the bed, pushing aside a stack of printouts.
“The Taylor firing,” I said, before she could start. “Denise’s reaction. She went from devastated girlfriend to crisis manager in about ninety seconds. Tears, then ‘I’ll pull his access logs, every system, every timestamp.’ Like she’d already thought through the steps before she walked into the room.”
“Or like she’s competent and handles stress well,” Olivia said. She was playing devil’s advocate, not because she believed it, but because she needed me to be sure. “Some people compartmentalize. It doesn’t make them guilty.”
“It doesn’t. But Taylor’s face, Olivia. That wasn’t the face of someone who got caught. That was the face of someone watching a trap close on him. He looked at Denise and said, ‘You know what you fucking did.’ Not to Rose. ToDenise.”
Olivia was quiet for a moment. “I went deeper.” She pulled up a screen on the laptop, and turned it toward me. “Remember when I told you I might not find anything? I was half right. The surface-level filings are clean. Ridgeline Supply checks out as a registered LLC, the hay company has a real address, the farrier service exists. On paper, everything looks legitimate.”
“But?”
“But I kept going. Cross-referencing registration dates, looking at registered agents, checking for patterns.” She tapped the screen. “TKM Digital Solutions. It’s listed as the registered agent for Ridgeline Supply, the fencing company that overcharged Rose by forty percent. TKM is also listed as the registered agent for two other vendors I found in the filings. Three companies, all registered within six months of each other, all using TKM as their agent.”
“And TKM is?—”
