Page 144 of Ironwood Ranch Cowboys

She looks up then and catches me watching. “You can come in, you know. This isn’t a museum.”

I step inside and close the door behind me. “It looks more prepared than most law offices I’ve seen.”

“That’s because most law offices assume the filing cabinet won’t actively betray them.”

The answer is dry. Tired. Entirely Annie.

I move closer to the wall and take in the layout again. The missing money tied to development pressure. Variant vendors connected through tax structures. Access logs pinned beside property bid windows.

It’s all there, and more than there. It’s integrated.

“You made copies.”

“I made several copies.”

“Where?”

She looks at me over the rim of her coffee cup. “That would defeat the purpose of hiding them.”

Despite everything, that almost gets a smile out of me. Almost. “Reasonable.”

Her eyes narrow. “You look exhausted.”

I glance back at the wall, buying myself a second. “Jake.”

She sets the mug down. “What happened?”

“I pushed. He stayed calm.”

“That sounds like it annoyed you.”

“It did.”

“Either he knows how to play this or he doesn’t understand how bad it looks.”

“I’m not interested in either possibility.”

That earns me the faintest shift at the corner of her mouth. Then she studies my face more closely. “Sit down, Silas.”

I take the chair opposite her desk because I’m more tired than I intended to admit, and because her expression makes refusal feel unnecessary.

“You think you’re losing control of it.”

I sit back in the chair and look at the evidence wall rather than at her. “This ranch has always depended on consistency. On knowing what holds and what doesn’t. Where the weak places are. What can be trusted to stay standing under pressure.”

I pause, then continue more slowly. “If someone has been bleeding it from the inside for this long without being stopped, then either I missed something I should’ve caught or I trusted the wrong structures to hold.”

Annie says nothing.

I rest my forearms on my knees and let the truth settle fully before I keep going. “Ironwood is land, yes, but it’s also memory. Obligation. Every decision my father made before he died and every one I’ve made since trying to keep the place from becoming smaller than what he left me. If this goes wrong, it isn’t just numbers on a ledger. It’s the whole shape of what this family has built. And I’m very aware that if I lose the ranch, I lose more than property.”

“What do you lose,” she asks, “besides the land?”

The question should irritate me. It doesn’t. It goes straight through.

I let out a breath and answer honestly because I’m too tired to invent a version that sounds more controlled than it is. “My brothers’ stability. The only home we’ve had that still means something. The proof that my father didn’t hand me something too large to keep alive.”

“That’s too much for one person to hold.”