“Seventy-two hours.”
“Could be less. Dorito’s pretty efficient.”
She opens her mouth, closes it, then opens it again. Her hands go to her hips as she processes the information that her evidence is inside a goat. Her glasses have slid down her nose, and a leaf is caught in her hair. I am not going to reach over and remove it because if I touch her right now, I won’t stop.
Her laugh starts as a startled breath, then cracks open, helpless and reluctant and halfway to crying.
She presses her hand over her mouth, but it doesn’t help. Her laughter escapes between her fingers. It’s raw and real, nothing like the careful, guarded woman who asked me about protocol in the kitchen earlier.
I would stand in this field until the sun burns out to listen to her laughter.
“Dorito’s eaten worse.”
“What could be worse than?—”
“Fence posts, a leather glove, an entire bag of Daniel’s protein bars, wrappers included. Half a garden hose. Took him three days and a vet visit for him to pass that.”
Her laughter doubles. She bends at the waist, one hand braced on her knee. Hearing it in the open air rather than compressed through a phone or filtered through a speaker, full and dimensional and so very close, is the best thing I’ve heard since she whispered my name on the couch this morning.
This woman drove through the night, crashed her car, woke up in a stranger’s house, and discovered her evidence is inside a goat. And now she’s standing in a ditch, laughing like the world just handed her something absurd and beautiful. She’s not fragile. She’s not a damsel. She’s a woman who risked everything and is handling a goat-shaped setback with more composure than I have right now.
The pasture stretches around us as we walk back, open and rolling. Land that makes you feel small in a way that’s a relief. The morning sun has burned off the spring chill, and the grassis still damp underfoot, soaking through the seams of my boots. Somewhere behind us, Dorito trots along with the smug, clip-clop rhythm of an animal completely indifferent to the federal evidence he’s digesting.
As we walk, my mind is already running the other thread. The one I haven’t said out loud because she’s laughing, and I won’t be the one to stop it.
Jenna stole data from a corporation targeting our land. She drove through the night. Crashed a mile from the ranch. If LandCorp is what she says it is, they’ll notice she’s gone. They’ll notice what she took. And eventually, they’ll figure out where she went.
The ranch has cameras on every access road. I built the security grid myself—motion sensors, encrypted feeds, night vision on the east ridge. It was built for wildlife and trespassers, not corporate threat response, but it’ll hold. I’ll need to loop in Beckett’s veteran watch network. Extend the perimeter alerts. Check the camera angles on the county road where she crashed.
I catalog the tasks the way I always do: priority, sequence, resources. It steadies me. It’s the version of control I trust. Not the kind that grips tighter, but the kind that builds a wall so the people inside can stop running.
She doesn’t need to know any of that yet. Right now, she needs to walk beside me and breathe and let the land do what Montana does to people who've been clenched too long.
The rest I’ll handle after dark.
“So we just wait?” Jenna asks as she walks beside me, close enough that I’m aware of the exact distance between her hand and mine. Two inches. Maybe less.
“We wait.” I keep my eyes on the fence line ahead, focusing on fence maintenance and not thinking about the two inches of charged air between our fingers. “I’ll monitor him. Shouldn’t be hard. Dorito doesn’t stray far from the house.”
“Because he’s hoping for more things to eat?”
“He ate the welcome mat last spring. We stopped replacing it.”
She makes a sound that’s not quite a laugh but something softer, and the wind carries it across the pasture. It lands somewhere inside me that I can’t name. My pulse hammers. My hands are at my sides, and my breathing is regular, but absolutely nothing about my interior matches my exterior right now. I’m figuring out how to make her laugh again, wondering how long to wait before I touch her on purpose, and whether she knows what she’s doing to me.
She doesn’t. That makes it worse.
Her hand swings closer with the next step, the back of her fingers brushing mine.
Neither of us pulls away.
It’s nothing. Skin against skin for half a second, the most casual contact two people walking side by side can have. Except that my stride has shortened to match hers without my deciding to, and her hand is still right there, warm and close, rewiring my nerve endings. I’ve held injured animals, pulled calves, and comforted a barn kitten no bigger than my palm, but nothing I’ve ever touched was as sweet as Jenna Calloway’s skin.
“The land is beautiful.” Her voice is quiet, a woman looking at open space as someone does when they’ve never had any. “I’ve never been anywhere like this.”
“It grows on you.”
What I don’t say is, “Stay.”
