Me on the phone building a case while he works his gear a few feet away, tracking me like I'm the only thing in this room worth his attention. The domesticity of it hits me somewhere unguarded. So does the heat behind it.
This is what it would look like. The two of us, building something. Not just an investigation. A life with someone who understands that the work matters, that the work doesn't stop, and that the person doing the work still needs coffee brought to them without being asked.
"I need the financial documents," Sylvia says. "Everything you've got on the prize money discrepancies, the shellcompanies, the altered payouts. And I need it sourced to your analysis, your name attached. You're the journalist who found this."
"I'm Grant's sister first. The journalism is how I got here."
"Even better. Sister of murdered rider investigates her brother's murder and circuit corruption when the authorities won't. That's the lead."
We spend the next hour building the story architecture. Sylvia will handle the writing and the editorial process. I'll provide the documentation, the sourcing, and the emotional core. We agree on a timeline: Sylvia needs a couple of weeks to verify, write, and get legal clearance from her outlet's attorneys.
I hang up and look at Colt. He's still in the chair, the bull rope coiled in his lap, watching me with an expression that carries last night's intensity at a lower temperature.
"That sounded like it went well," he says.
"Sylvia's good. She's thorough, she's fast and she doesn't scare easy."
"Sounds like someone else I know."
"Flattery won't get you out of buying me breakfast, Holloway."
"Who said anything about getting out of it?" He stands and pulls a shirt on, and I watch the scratch marks disappear under cotton with a pang of something I refuse to call possessiveness. "There's a diner down the road. You can tell me the plan over eggs."
We eat breakfast at a formica counter with our knees touching under the bar and my notebook open between the saltshaker and the ketchup.
He eats like a man who burned a significant number of calories last night and doesn't bother being subtle about it. I eat like a woman who has a federal case to report on and a story tobuild, and a cowboy's thigh pressed against hers under a diner counter.
"I still say Torres won’t like it," he says between bites.
"And as I said before, she doesn't have to like it, but it will help her in the end.
"And if Merrick comes after you personally?"
"Then I'll have a very pissed off bull rider standing between me and whatever he sends." I take a sip of coffee. "Unless you've got somewhere else to be."
"Nowhere else I'd rather be." He says it flat and final, in the voice he uses when he's done discussing something because the answer was always obvious.
His hand finds my knee under the counter and squeezes once, brief and hard. The gesture is the same one he used under Torres's conference table, and it carries the same weight: everything he won't say packed into the pressure of his fingers.
The next couple of weeks are a controlled burn.
The circuit moves to Tucson, and we go with it. Colt rides, accumulating points and maintaining his position at the top of the standings. The circuit identity he's built, the unstable, grief-stricken rider with a death wish, gives way to something more dangerous: a focused, calculating competitor with a purpose behind every ride.
The other riders notice. The change is too sharp to miss. Colt isn't fighting the bulls anymore. He's working with them, reading their patterns, anticipating their moves, riding with the technical precision of the athlete he was before Grant's death rewired him for self-destruction.
Wade comments on it at the chutes. "You stop wanting to die, Holloway?"
"Started wanting to win," Colt says. "There's a difference."
"Hell of a difference." Wade takes a pull from the flask he thinks nobody notices. "Wish somebody would explain it to me."
The exchange is brief, and Wade drifts away with the loose, unsteady gait of a man who's been drinking since noon. I file it away. Wade is spiraling in the way that riders spiral on this circuit, quietly and publicly at the same time, and nobody's asking the right questions about why.
I spend the downtime between events working the story with Sylvia. We refine the financial analysis, adding two more years of prize money data that reveal the fraud goes back further than Grant discovered. We map the shell company structure in a graphic that makes the money trail visible to a lay reader. We interview additional circuit insiders who agree to speak on background, confirming details about Thornton Livestock's operations that corroborate Quinn's on-record testimony.
Colt appoints himself my shadow during all of it. He doesn't interfere with the work, but he's always there. When I meet a background source at a coffee shop in Tucson, he sits at the counter with a cup he never drinks, positioned between my booth and the door.
When a stock contractor I don't recognize lingers too close to me at an event, Colt materializes beside me before I register the man's presence, standing close enough that his shoulder blocks my body from view. He doesn't say a word. He doesn't have to. The contractor moves on. Colt's hand settles on the small of my back, guiding me toward the truck, and the heat of his palm through my shirt is a brand I feel for the rest of the afternoon.
