“Malcolm. It’s Fraser Kincaid.”
“Mr. Kincaid. Olivia said you’d be calling. What can I do for you?”
I looked at the side mirror one more time. The ranch was gone. Just highway now, straight and flat, cutting through a valley that didn’t know anything had changed.
“I need a forensic accountant. Someone who specializes in tracing shell companies. Specifically in Colorado.”
“Olivia mentioned Colorado. Unusual for you. What’s the scope?”
“A company called TKM Digital Solutions, registered in Colorado six months ago. I need to know who actually created it. Not the name on the filing, but the person behind it. Bank accounts, signatories, incorporation documents, every paper trail that exists. And I need it fast.”
“How fast?”
“Before a woman I love loses everything she’s built.”
Silence on the line. “I’ll have someone on it by end of day. You’ll have a preliminary report asap.”
“Thank you, Malcolm.”
I hung up. Set the phone on my knee. Stared at the road.
Olivia had turned back around, facing forward, giving me the privacy of not being watched. But her hand came over the seat back, just for a second, and squeezed my shoulder. The gesture of someone who’d been in the trenches with me for ten years and understood that some things didn’t need words.
Dex glanced over at her, then at the rearview mirror. “We’ll find it, Graham.”
“Aye. We have to.”
The highway stretched ahead of us, flat and endless, taking me further from Rose with every mile. Behind us, the mountains were still visible. Blue and distant, holding the ranch in their shadow.
I wasn’t retreating.
I was reloading.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
ROSE
The ranch wasquiet in a way I’d nearly forgotten.
Not the good quiet. Not the five AM stillness when the sky was still dark and the only sound was hooves shifting in stalls and the whole day felt like it hadn’t decided what it was yet. This was absence. The sound of people who weren’t there anymore. Cabins with their doors propped open and their beds stripped. The kitchen without Jamie’s laughter, no Olivia scrolling her iPad, no Dex’s laptop clicking. No Graham.
I did morning chores alone.
Fed Cassiopeia first, the way I always did. Then Brutus, then Starlight, then Ricky, and the rest of the horses. Checked water troughs. Mucked stalls. The routine was the same as it had been every morning, but my body was running the program without me. Hands moving, brain somewhere else entirely.
I kept finding him everywhere.
The water trough Graham had repaired his second week, the one that had been leaking for months and that I’d never gotten around to fixing. The fence post he’d replaced in the northpasture, straighter than the ones Hank set, which Hank would never admit. The spot in the arena where Brutus had rested his massive head on Graham’s shoulder while Graham talked to the camera, and eleven million people had watched a man fall in love with a horse.
The kitchen, where Kaya had thrown a dish towel at my head and Graham had looked between us, confused, and askedDid I miss something?
The lounge, where he’d kissed me for the first time.
The trail, where I’d turned Cassie around and saidWe’re going backand he’d understood exactly what I meant.
I finished chores by seven-thirty. Stood in the barn aisle with nothing left to do and nowhere to go and no one to talk to except horses who didn’t know their lives were about to change.
“I’m sorry,” I said to no one. To all of them.
