Chapter 4
Ethan
Three hours in, and the ditch has yielded nothing.
The crash site looks worse in daylight. Jenna’s car is nose-down at an angle that makes my stomach clench, the front crumpled against the far bank, the driver’s door still hanging open from the night before. The skid marks are short, which means she barely braked. In daylight, the distance between where the tires left the road and where the car stopped is laughably small. Three seconds. Maybe less. The difference between arriving and not.
I don’t say any of that.
I’m on my knees in the ditch grass, working in a grid pattern, hands black to the wrists with mud, while Jenna is ten feet away doing the same. She’s been directing the search since we got here, reconstructing her steps, figuring the angle of impact, calculating where her bag would have landed versus where her body ended up. Data analyst brain. Even in a panic, she’s precise.
She told me to start at the driver’s side and work outward. I did. She hasn’t suggested we take a break. She hasn’t thankedme or apologized for the inconvenience. She told me where to look, and I looked there. We’ve been doing this for three hours in silence, only breaking when she asks me to check another section.
My knees ache, and a blister is forming on my right thumb, but none of this registers as a reason to stop. She risked her job for this. Her health insurance. Every mile of the drive that put her car in this ditch.
Although I don’t yet know the full extent of what she’s lost, I recognize the grief in her eyes. That makes this flash drive the most important thing in the world to me because this beautiful woman needs me to be useful, and being useful is something I know how to do.
“It should be here.” Her voice has an edge now as she stands in the spot where I found her last night, turning in a tight circle, hands pushing through the grass as if she can will the thing into existence. “It’s yellow and black. Striped. It would stand out against”—she waves at the green and brown around us—“anything.”
She’s right. A bee-striped flash drive in this ditch should be visible from twenty feet. We’ve checked every pocket, every fold of her jacket, the inside of the car, and the shoulder of the road. I went through her bag twice. She went through it three times. The drive is not here.
Jenna paces, her hands clenched at her sides. The skin at her wrists, where her sleeves have ridden up, is angry and red. She doesn’t pull them down. She doesn’t even notice because she’s spiraling. Her pace tightens and her circles become smaller and her breathing grows faster. She risked everything for that evidence, and now it’s gone.
My urge to fix this is so strong that it feels physical, like pressure behind my ribs urging me to do something, say something, make it better. But the right words don’t exist. She lost evidence that could protect this ranch and expose a corporation, and no combination of words will change that. So I stay in the ditch and keep searching. I don’t fill the silence because it belongs to her, and she needs it more than she needs my comfort.
I’m not good at witnessing rather than solving. I’m built for action—fix the fence, pull the calf, reroute the camera feed. Standing still while someone hurts makes my clenched jaw ache. But she doesn’t need me to fix it; she needs me to take it as seriously as she does.
So I do.
Jenna stops pacing.
I watch her from my crouch in the grass. I’m always watching her, which is a problem I’ll deal with later. Something shifts in her expression. Not panic, but something slower. A thought assembling itself.
“The goat was licking my hand.”
I go still.
“When I was on the ground, the goat was licking my hand.” She says it like she’s reading evidence aloud, as if she’s back in a conference room presenting findings. “My hand was near my pocket. Where the flash drive was. Do you think the goat took it back to its... what’s it called? Nest? Lair?”
My face does something I can’t control. Somewhere between horror and a laugh I will take to my grave before I let it out. Because right now, she’s standing in a ditch holding theshattered pieces of her escape plan together, and I will not be the man who laughs.
But… yeah. Dorito ate the flash drive.
“Jenna.” I stand and brush my hands on my jeans. I keep my voice at the exact pitch I use when I’m telling Daniel a heifer got through the south gate—calm, factual, this-is-a-situation-and-here-is-how-we-handle-it. “The drive is durable. Plastic casing, metal connector. Designed to survive drops, water, impact.”
She stares at me.
“Dorito’s digestive system is...” I search for the word. “Thorough, but not destructive. He’s passed worse. We’ll need to wait twenty-four to seventy-two hours for him to process it.”
The silence that follows is the loudest thing I’ve ever heard.
“You’re telling me,” she says, her voice very controlled, which I'm learning is more dangerous than her panic, “that a goat ate the evidence that could bring down a corporation.”
“Yeah.”
“And we have to wait for the goat to?—”
“Pass it through his digestive system.”
