Page 152 of Ironwood Ranch Cowboys

My pulse is too calm.

That means I’m angry.

I pass two riders, a feed cart, three children with paper cups of lemonade, and Margaret O’Hara pretending not to gossip loudly enough for the next county to hear. None of them matter.

Then I see her.

Annie’s standing near the equipment trailers, camera clutched in both hands, body too still for the drama around her. Her face is pale under the dusting of freckles across her nose. Blue hair is coming loose from its bun in bright, furious strands.

Relief hits first.

Then I see her hands shaking. That wipes everything else clean.

“Annie.”

Her head snaps up.

The moment she sees me, her expression shifts. Not relief, exactly, or even fear. More complicated, which is increasingly the only category she seems to occupy in my life.

“Cody.”

I reach her and check the space around us. Trailers. Back path. Cottonwood. Generator station. Temporary fencing.

Too many blind spots. Too many people with legitimate reasons to be here.

“What happened?” I ask.

She swallows, then turns the camera screen toward me. “I saw him again.”

Everything in me stills.

I take the camera from her carefully. “Show me.”

She steps closer, close enough that her shoulder almost touches my arm. “Frame eighteen forty-seven first.”

I scroll to the frame. At first, the image is rodeo movement, dust, bodies, and fencing, Willy in the foreground playing to the crowd with that theatrical idiot grin of his.

But Annie’s finger comes up and taps the far edge of the screen.

“There.”

I zoom in. The image breaks down, pixels softening around the edges.

A man stands beyond the holding pens. Baseball cap, dark jacket, body angled partly behind a support post, face turned away.

“Next two,” she says.

I move forward.

Blur. Shoulder. Trailer edge. A line of motion that might be someone turning away, or might be nothing if you’re the sort of person invested in pretending threats don’t exist until they’re standing close enough to breathe on you.

I’m not that sort of person.

“You followed him?” I ask.

Her chin lifts. “I tried to.”

That answers my question and irritates me at the same time. “You shouldn’t have done that alone.”