Page 172 of Ironwood Ranch Cowboys

I flip another page and highlight a routing approval. Then another. Then stop.

My thumb taps once against my camera automatically.

Grange & Holloway Legal Consulting.

Tessa Grange’s firm, seemingly linked to a lot of this. It’s a hard pill to swallow, and not something I’m totally convinced of, but still… the thing about numbers is that they don’t lie.

People do. Systems do. Classifications do.

But numbers themselves? They tell the truth eventually if you pull hard enough.

The problem is that smart people know how to manipulate where that truth appears. And whoever built this mess is smart. Too smart to leave obvious fingerprints.

I swivel toward the second monitor and pull up another file.

Same legal review notation. Different vendor chain. Different event. Same firm.

My pulse kicks harder.

By the fifth overlap, my skin’s gone cold. Because coincidence has a statistical limit, and Tessa Grange keeps surfacing just close enough to the edges of these entities to make my instincts start screaming.

Structural proximity.

The kind of proximity that only matters if you already understand how all of this works.

Which I do. Unfortunately.

I sit back slowly in the chair.

Outside the office windows, the ranch moves through late afternoon sunlight. Horses in the lower paddocks, ranch hands near the feed bay, trucks shifting down the long gravel road.

Everything looks normal.

That’s the terrifying part. This entire thing keeps looking normal until you tilt it sideways.

A knock sounds lightly against the office door before Duke leans in carrying two iced coffees. “Checking to make sure you’re still alive.”

“Debatable.”

He steps inside and hands me a cup before leaning one hip against the desk. His eyes flick across the paperwork spread. “You found something else?”

I take the coffee. “Maybe.”

“That’s your ‘yes but I don’t want to say it out loud yet’ voice.”

“I have a voice for that?”

“Honey, you have at least seven different investigation voices now. Cody’s very proud.”

I snort softly despite myself. Then my gaze drifts back toward the highlighted legal notations.

Duke notices. “What is it?”

I hesitate, because I don’t know what this means yet, and once I say it out loud, it becomes real in a way I’m not sure I’m ready for.

Still…

“We keep seeing legal overlap,” I say carefully. “Not direct involvement. Just…” I tap the page. “Administrative proximity.”