Page 68 of Forbidden Protector

"That's most of the job, yes."

"Then follow this." She snips one stem and sets the shears down on the bench beside her. A small precise gesture, her hand closing hard around the handle for one second before it lets go.

"Nineteen sixty-two. There was a survey authorized on the Front. Ask who paid for it. Not the company name on the paper. Companies are coats. Ask whose money was inside the coat."

"Ma'am, if you have information relevant to a federal investigation, I need you to⁠—"

"I have a date, Agent Tatum. That's all I'm able to have." She looks at me then, for the first time since I've known her. Whatever is in her face stops every procedural sentence I had loaded. "You lost someone to this. I can see it on you. I've worn that exact face for forty years. I know its weight." A beat, quieter. "So hear me. The year matters more than the man. When you find nineteen sixty-two, you're going to want to keep pulling. Don't. Not yet. Write it down. Put it somewhere safe. And wait until someone asks you for it."

"Who's going to ask me for it?"

She picks the shears back up, snips another stem, and drops it in the basket. For a moment I think that's the whole answer I'm going to get.

"Someone with a better claim to it than either of us," she says, and turns back to the canes like the conversation was never anything more than pruning.

I stand there in the warm sunshine with a year in my hands I've never heard connected to anything, no company, no name, no shape at all. Just a date that predates my grandfather's death by twenty-five years.

Somehow, according to the only Blackwater who's ever told me a true thing without being asked twice, it matters more than any of the men involved.

Holt is waiting at the truck when I come around the front of the house, arms crossed, watching me cross the yard. I don't have the bandwidth to work out what's on his face.

I get in. He doesn't ask what his mother said and I don't offer it.

We pull out of the circular drive in silence, and I sit with the two things Gideon's own house handed me this morning, one from each Blackwater who bothered to speak the truth out loud.

He didn't deny it.

And his wife just handed me a year I've never heard of.

TWENTY-ONE

HOLT

He sends for me again in the early evening, and this time I come alone.

I am standing in the middle of the study, not against the wall, and that is the first thing wrong.

Tonight my father didn't let me disappear into the paneling.

"Come stand where I can see you."

I came, because some habits outlive the reasons for them, and I am still finding out which ones.

"You defended her." Gideon doesn't look up from the desk. He turns one page of the ledger in front of him, unhurried, like the sentence can wait on his schedule instead of mine. "In front of me. In my own house."

"Yes."

"You are the one son I never had to worry about wanting things." He says it slow, like a man laying stone. "Knox wants the ranch. Wants Maren and said so in front of both sets of parents like a man who'd stopped caring who heard it. Sage wants to matter to somebody who isn't me. Even your mother wants her garden and her silence and whatever she buries in both." His hand goes flat on the desk. "You never wanted anything. That was the whole use of you. A man with no wanting in him doesn't get talked out of his post."

"I heard you."

"You heard me and you're still standing there like I handed you a compliment. I am telling you what you were for, Holt. Past tense, because you've gone and ruined the present one."

Standing at the peak of a mountain with wind reminding me I was on top of the world. The high lakes I used to backpack into alone before anybody thought to ask why a kid would rather sleep above the treeline than in his own bed. A woman who put her hand on my pulse in a snowstorm and didn't flinch at what she found there.

I don't say any of it. Arguing is for men who think the other side is listening.

"Anyone who touches her answers to me." I report it like a fence line down. Flat, no weight loaded into the words because the words don't need it. "Doesn't matter whose payroll they're on. Doesn't matter whose name is on the account. That includes anyone in this house."