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“You asked. I told you to.”
“I’m a grown man. I could have said no.” He shifts his weight. “She’d have been angry about the danger. She’d have gotten over the danger. She won’t get over this easy, and she shouldn’t.”
“I know.”
“Do you?” He turns and looks at me straight. “Because your father would have stood right here and figured out how to get her back. I’m asking if you’re going to figure out how to deserve it instead.”
I don’t have an answer. He nods like that’s an answer and goes back inside.
Chapter 9
Tessa
By 1:20 in the afternoon, everything I carried out of Barbed Crown has a number, a photograph, and a history that includes Garrett McCall whether I want his name there or not.
My attorney’s conference table holds my cases, my phones, my laptop, and the clothes I packed out of the guest room. Mercer works from the far end with the location tag sealed in a clear sleeve. He doesn’t ask me to make any of it prettier for the man who paid for the equipment used against me. I like him more for that than I can say.
My work survives. Everything I observed with my own eyes, every photograph and certified record, was backed up to counsel before I ever touched the ranch network. What changed is who could see it. An undisclosed client copied my working notes onto a Barbed Crown server four separate times, and I don’t yet know who opened them.
“Do you stand behind the underlying observations?” Dana asks.
“Yes.”
“And your conclusion about who ran the theft?”
“I don’t have one.”
Mercer looks up. “You have suspicions.”
“Suspicion is cheap. Apparently so is storage.”
His mouth moves once. Dana writes the sentence down. Attorneys enjoy humor most when they can file it.
She slides a keycard envelope across the table. A corporate apartment her firm uses for witnesses, twelve minutes from the county building. Barbed Crown doesn’t know the address and never will. My fee continues. My security continues. Garrett’s attorney confirmed both in writing at 11:38, before I’d even asked.
I read the confirmation twice. It doesn’t apologize for him. It does something more useful. It keeps his breach from becoming my bill.
Then I fill out the conflict disclosure my contract requires. The form is written for ordinary human failures. A fake public engagement to the head of the company I’m auditing requires the last box and most of the explanation field. I disclose the private relationship too, because disclosing half a conflict just creates a second problem.
My next prospective client calls seven minutes after I send it.
A three-week provenance review for a family dispersal sale. We’d agreed on scope and price but hadn’t signed. The owner speaks carefully, which tells me an attorney is sitting beside him.
“We saw the announcement from Barbed Crown,” he says. “My partners want to postpone until your disclosure is resolved.”
“That’s your right.”
“I’m not saying we think you did anything wrong.”
“You’re saying you won’t hire me while other people decide whether I did.”
The silence is answer enough. I make it easy for him to hang up, because begging a client to trust my independence is an efficient way to prove I shouldn’t be trusted.
That contract would have carried me through the slow season and paid off the last of the legal bills from two years ago. I close the proposal and sit very still.
Garrett did this. Not the theft, not the deputy, not the brake line. This. The engagement was my idea, but the tracker wasn’t, and the mirror wasn’t, and now my name is sitting in a stranger’s risk file next to his.
I pick up my case. Work that survives scrutiny doesn’t improve while I stare at what it’s cost me.
