Page 106 of Wild Sanctuary

“I’ve done this before.”

The corner of his mouth twitches, not quite a smile but close enough that I feel it in my chest.

We pass the turnoff for the cemetery and I don’t look. Not yet. Not today. Not until I get to the truth.

Soon, Dad.

Wyatt adjusts his grip on the wheel. “The call from the bank.” His tone is tight. “That morning. You think that’s connected.”

“A flag that nobody at the bank could explain, timed to keep you off a truck that went off a cliff twenty minutes later.” I keep my voice soft and even. “Yes, I do think it’s connected. Nothing about this is random.”

“Then someone at the bank flagged the account on purpose.”

“Or someone told the bank to flag it.”

His knuckles go pale on the wheel. I let him sit with that because some things need room to breathe. And hearing that the phone call he’s spent three years blaming himself for might be the only reason he’s still alive qualifies as one of those things.

“One more thing.” I swallow before continuing. “Whatever we find today, it stays between us. Nobody else.”

He frowns. “The family⁠—”

“Nobody, Wyatt. Not the siblings, not the hands, not a single soul back at the ranch.” I hold up a hand before he can argue, refusing to back down. Not on this. I’ve worked too hard, and our fathers deserve justice. “I know they lost Bill too, and I know what I’m asking. But our fathers died because someone talked. The second we get proof, they’re the first people we tell.”

He doesn’t like it. I can see the resistance in his shoulders, the instinct to defend the people he trusts. But the journalist in me learned a long time ago that the most dangerous leaks come from people who mean well, and right now I need Wyatt to think like a partner, not a protector.

“Fine,” he concedes after a beat. “You and me.”

He reaches across the console without looking away from the road. I take his hand, and he squeezes once before letting go and putting it back on the wheel.

“You and me.”

He turns onto Main Street and I watch Blackstone Creek slide past the window. This town held my whole childhood and a whole lot of my dreams, and now it might be holding the answer to who took my father from me.

Wyatt parallel parks in front of Sky Country Books with practiced ease, then he kills the engine and sits for a moment, both hands still on the wheel as he looks at the shop front through the windshield.

“Daisy.”

“Yeah?”

“Whatever she tells us in there.” He turns to look at me, and his green eyes are steady and clear and carrying something that makes my breath catch. “We follow it. Wherever it goes. Even if it goes somewhere we don’t like.”

I nod. “Even then.”

He holds my gaze for one more second, then kills the engine and climbs out. He comes around and opens my door. When I step down, he falls into step beside me, close enough that his arm brushes mine, and neither of us moves away.

Sky Country Books smells the way every used bookstore in a small town smells: paper and dust and the faint sweetness of old glue. Shelves line every wall from floor to ceiling, crammed with paperbacks and hardcovers and the kind of local interest titles that only sell to tourists passing through on their way to Glacier.

Wyatt hangs back near the door without me asking, understanding what I need right now. On the chair behind the door, Hemingway deigns to let Wyatt scratch behind one ear.

And in true testament to Wyatt’s connection with animals, the orange ball of fur even purrs.

A woman appears from the back, carrying a box of books balanced against her hip. She’s in her mid-forties. Wiry, with reading glasses pushed up into dark curly hair streaked with gray, and she startles when she sees us, but quickly recovers with the practiced smile of someone who spends her days dealing with the public.

“Sorry about that, y’all. Shipment day.” She sets the box on the counter and brushes her hands on her jeans. “Can I help you find something?”

“Alma Cutter?”

The smile holds, but her eyes sharpen. “That’s me.”