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"You wanted the bay mare's bloodwork." She slid that folder across the desk to him, separate. "There it is. February twelfth, came back clean, full panel. Whatever the vet's asking about, that's your starting place." She let him have the bloodwork. Watched him pick it up. Watched the small relief in him at finding the thing he'd come in for sitting where he'd been told it would be.

Then she turned the lamp slightly so it lit the side table.

"That's something else," she said. "I think you should sit down for it. It can wait until after the vet if you'd rather. But I'd rather show you tonight."

The shutter went up behind his eyes. It was the same one she'd seen on the porch the first day, in a different key. He set the bloodwork down.

"Why were you in the Burchall files."

"The bloodwork was inside the back cover of the Burchall folder. Stuck. I didn't go looking. It was there because everything's everywhere and you know it." She kept her voice level. "I found the bloodwork. And then I read the offer, because I can’t look at a document like that and not read it, and because if I’d been reading the mail in this office for the last three years it wouldn’t have sat there for that long without somebody catching what's on page nineteen. So sit down."

A long beat. She watched him do the math behind his face, the suspicion, the recalibration, the moment where he chose, against everything in him, to trust her enough to sit down.

He sat down.

"Walk me through it," he said.

So she did.

She walked him through it the way Halloran had taught her — slowly, plain, no jargon she didn't need, the cover letter first because that was what they were pretending to offer, then the back-half schedule because that was what they were actually buying. She showed him the definition of mineral interest on page nine, which sounded normal until you read the modification on page seventeen, which sounded technical until you laid it against the surface-access clause on page nineteen. She put her finger on each piece. She did not raise her voice. She did not editorialize. She let the documents say it.

He didn't interrupt. He didn't argue. He read where she pointed when she pointed, and he was silent in a way she hadn’t yet heard him be silent, and at the end, when she sat back, he sat back too.

"They're trying to buy the rights underneath," he said.

"Underneath, in perpetuity, for a price they don't have to name in writing until you've signed page one. The cover letter is a handshake. The schedule is the contract. They're banking on a man who hasn't slept in three months signing the handshake and not reading to nineteen."

"My father has been signing things he hasn't read since I was a child."

"I know," Lara said, gently. "I gathered."

Dean put both hands on the desk and looked down at them. They were ranch hands, calloused, with a thin white scar across the knuckle of his right index that she had noticed her second week and chose not to ask about. He looked at his hands a long time.

"You found this today."

"In an hour. I'm not bragging. It's just… that's the thing I'm good at. That's what I went to school for. That's what I did in Boston, except in Boston I was finding it for billionaires and here I'm finding it for…" She stopped. "It's the same job. The documents don't know whose side they're on."

He looked up at her.

His eyes did the thing they'd done in the doorway the day she'd been laughing with Levi — the wall came down for about a half-second and he was just looking, the whole man right there, and she felt it in the back of her knees the way she'd felt it on the porch and was going to keep feeling it, apparently, for the rest of her natural life.

"Thank you," he said. The word still cost him. She watched it cost him. "I mean it."

"You're welcome."

"I owe you twice today."

"You don't owe me, Dean."

It came out without her thinking. Dean. The first time she'd used it to his face. She heard it land in the quiet office and felt her own face want to flush and willed it not to. He noticed. She watched him notice. Neither of them said anything about it.

The vet's truck came up the drive.

He stood up. So did she. The Burchall papers were still spread on the side table between them.

"I'll deal with the vet," he said. "We'll come back to this tonight. After the kids are down. If you can stay."

"I can stay."