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I'm losing this, he thought, with a strange and terrible calm. Not I might. Not I have to be careful.

I'm losing it. I've already lost it. I just haven't told her yet.

He turned over. The warmth was long gone off his hand, and he could still feel exactly where it had been.

He slept, eventually, on that, which was a different thing entirely from the sleep of a man who still believed he could stop it.

CHAPTER TEN

Lara got to the office before seven, which had nothing to do with the work and everything to do with the fact that Dean wouldn't be in until after the morning feed. She'd had her reasons ready on the drive — a second Burchall folder she hadn't finished, the quiet hours being the best time to think — and not one of them was the truth. The truth was a week old and lived in her hands: the night his palm had come down over hers and neither of them had moved, and what she'd learned about herself in those three seconds, which was that she could want like that and stand perfectly still and not pull away. So she came in before anyone, when the office was hers and the only sound was the coffee maker and the swamp cooler ticking on, and she could pretend for an hour that she was just very good at her job.

She was very good at her job. That part wasn't a lie. It was the only part of the last five years that had never once let her down.

The files were John's. All of it was, six generations of a family's paper, filed by a system only John understood, and John couldn't get up the stairs to explain it anymore. She'd been quietly rebuilding it for weeks. That was how she'd found the first thing, before any of this started: the buried clause in the offer Dean had been drowning in, the one that didn't say what the cover letter claimed it said. He'd looked at her differently after that. She'd noticed, and put the noticing somewhere she wasn't going to look at.

This morning she found the second thing.

It was in the back of a folder marked, in John's hand, HENDERSON — FENCE/EASEMENT, which was the kind of label that made your eyes slide right off it, a neighbor and a fence line, the most boring sentence in ranching. But the fence correspondence stopped halfway through the folder and something else started, and Lara sat very still in the early light and read it twice to be sure she was reading it.

Burchall had bought the Henderson mineral rights.

Not the ranch. The Hendersons still had their ranch, still ran their cattle on the surface of it, still woke up every morning on land that said Henderson on the gate. But the rights to what lay under it — the minerals, sold off separate from the dirt the way they did out here, the way most people forgot was even possible until it mattered — those had quietly changed hands. To a holding company. And the holding company, three documents deeper, when you followed it the way you followed anything if you'd spent ten years being paid to follow money through the rooms it didn't want to be followed into, was Burchall.

And somebody had filed it under fence. That was the part that made the back of her neck go cold before the rest of it did. You didn't tuck a sale like this behind a folder labeled FENCE/EASEMENT by accident. You did it because a fence was the most boring word in ranching, the one word guaranteed to make a busy man's eyes slide right past — which meant somebody had wanted it read as a property-line nothing, two neighbors and a boundary, the kind of thing you skimmed and refiled. It was not a boundary nothing.

She sat back.

The Hendersons were north. She got up and found the boundary map John kept rolled in the corner like a poster from a war, and she spread it on the desk with a coffee cup on each curling corner, and she put her finger on the Royston line and traced it north to where it met the neighbor's, and she felt the thing go cold and clear in her chest that always went cold and clear when the numbers stopped being numbers and started being a sentence somebody was trying to finish without anyone noticing.

It wasn't one ranch. That was the part. A man could look at this and see one neighbor selling off something he was never going to dig up anyway, easy money, no harm. But Lara didn't look at things one at a time. She'd been trained — by a job that used her up and a fiancé who used her worse — to see the shape a thing made when you stopped looking at the pieces, and the shape this made was a hand, closing, one finger at a time, from the north.

Because here was the thing she understood that maybe nobody else had stopped to: the Roystons had told Burchall no. She'd read the offer, read Dean's refusal, watched the whole standoff move through the paperwork. And a company that got a no from the family it wanted didn't always come back and fight the family. Sometimes it just went around. Bought what lay under the neighbors instead — quietly, one parcel at a time, until it owned the minerals on every piece of ground that ringed the Royston line. The Roystons would still own their own land, top to bottom. That wasn't the point. The point was that you couldn't graze cattle in peace on an island in the middle of somebody else's mine — the water didn't stop at a fence, the trucks and the brine and the ruin of it didn't stop at a fence — and a family hemmed in on every side by Burchall ground would, sooner or later, find that the no they'd been so proud of had quietly stopped being worth anything. That was the threat. Not the one sale. The ring the one sale was the first piece of.

She didn’t call Dean.

She thought about it. He was four hundred yards away with his arms in a feed trough and a phone in his pocket, and the natural thing, the thing an employee did, was walk it straight to the man running the place. But she made herself stop and think it through the way she'd think through anything that mattered, and what she came to was this: she wasn't sure. She knew what it looked like. She didn't know what it meant — legally, whether a severed-rights sale to a neighbor was a thing a family could fight or a thing that was simply done, and she was not going to walk four hundred yards and put that look back on Dean Royston's face — the one he'd worn the night his father went down, the night he came home at two in the morning and stood in the kitchen like a man holding the roof up with his back — over something she hadn't confirmed.

That was the reason she'd give. It was even mostly true.

The other reason was that Nathan Greene's office was in town, twenty minutes away, and Dean was here, and she'd take any errand in the world this morning that pointed her car away from this ranch and the man on it.

She rolled the map back up. She made a copy of everything. And she drove to town.

Nathan Greene kept his office on the second floor of the only building in Soluno tall enough to have a second floor, over the pharmacy, with a frosted-glass door that said GREENE & ASSOCIATES in gold letters worn down to the ghost of gold, and a waiting room with two good leather chairs and a coffee table of magazines so old one of them had a recipe for a holiday Lara was fairly sure had already happened.

She was reaching for the door when it opened toward her, and a woman came out.

Late twenties, Lara put her, though out here the sun made that a guess, with a kind face and brown hair pushed back off it and the careful, slightly watchful eyes of a person who'd learned somewhere along the way to keep her own counsel. She had a folder under her arm and her keys already in her hand, a woman on her way to the next thing, and they did the little doorway dance, the oh, sorry, after you, and then the woman stopped and looked at Lara with a quick warm flicker of recognition.

"You're Dean's Lara," she said. "The one at the ranch. Olivia Bateman." She put out her hand, and it was a good handshake, brief and real. "Hi."

"Lara Baxter." She didn't bother correcting the Dean's. She'd learned that battle wasn't worth fighting in a town this size, where she'd belonged to the Roystons in the local accounting since roughly her second day. "Nice to meet you."

"You too. I hear you've taken enough off Dean's plate that he can actually get out and run the place, so." Olivia smiled, and it was a real one, but it didn't stay, not unfriendly, just a woman who didn't spend more than she had. "I won't keep you. Nathan's free, he's just grumbling about his coffee." She was already moving, keys jingling. "Tell Helen I said hi, if you're back out there. And welcome. For what it's worth. People are glad you landed here."

And she was gone, down the stairs, light and quick, and Lara stood for a second with her hand on the frosted door and the odd feeling of having met someone she already half-knew — familiar, though she couldn't have said from where, family-adjacent in the way everyone in this town seemed woven to everyone else, a quilt she was still learning the pattern of. She let it go. She had somewhere to be.

Nathan Greene was sixty-some years old and built like a man who'd been big once and had settled, with reading glasses pushed up into white hair and a real cup of coffee he was indeed unhappy with, and he came around the desk to shake her hand with both of his because that was the kind of man he was — the kind who'd known the family's children by name before they could walk, who'd handled John's affairs through Kelly-Anne's long dying and brought the Scotch himself the week she went.