My breath catches. The words land differently this time. Usually when he says it—come visit, come see Montana, come meet me—it’s easy to deflect with jokes about work, projects, money, the vague architecture of a life that suddenly feels very fragile. But tonight something has shifted in his voice. He says it as if the only question is why I haven’t done it yet.
Come to me.As if there’s a door I could walk through, and someone would be waiting on the other side.
But God…
“I want to.” I clear my throat. “Things at the office are—there’s a lot happening. But the files I’m processing show discrepancies. Numbers that don’t add up. I can’t lose this job.”
“Come to the ranch,” he says. “I’ve got a guest room. Maggie makes enough food for twelve people every night and getsoffended when it’s not eaten. Trust me, you’d be doing us a favor.”
I press the speaker closer to my ear, relishing the endorphin high from his baritone. “You’re selling the guest room pretty hard, cowboy.”
“The window faces east. You get the sunrise.”
I’ve imagined meeting him countless times. But what I know isn’t a face—it’s a low, steady voice with a drawl that drops consonants like they’re optional.Thinkin’. Wantin’.Words that feel like they’re being peeled open and offered with a mug of warm honey-spiced tea. He says “yeah” instead of “yes.” He goes quiet before saying anything important, and the silence is so intentional that my skin prickles every time.
“Ethan. We haven’t even seen each other’s faces.”
“I know what your laugh sounds like when you’re tired,” he says. “You grab peanut butter cups from the vending machine at four p.m. every day because that’s when your blood sugar crashes. You read three books a week and always start with the last page because you need to know it ends okay before you’ll invest.” He pauses. “I don’t need to see your face to know you, Jenna.”
My throat tightens. I push my glasses up my nose, processing and trying to fit his words into a framework that makes sense. He makes it sound so simple, knowing someone, being known, as if it’s not the most terrifying thing in the world.
“I want to.” My voice comes out smaller than I intended. “I can come next week. I’m planning to come next week.”
Next week is the safe answer. It buys time, keeping a comfortable distance between his voice in my ear and his body in the same room. But I’ve been saying “next week” for a month.
And now the thing I built in the safety of distance, this slow, impossible intimacy, is demanding that I show up, revealing every reason I checked that no photos box.
My heart beats rapidly. I should say no. I should say I’m a disaster, I’m flaking out on basic self-care, and I haven’t slept properly in weeks. My skin is the worst it’s been in years. Stress has my forearms burning under my sleeves and angry red patches climbing from my wrists to my elbows. The dark circles under my eyes defy even the best concealer. My nails are bitten down to nothing. I’m not the version of myself I want him to meet.
And then there’s the other thing I can’t say: every person I’ve let close has eventually found a reason to let go. I’ve been pre-packing my bags since I was eleven.
“Let me give you the address,” he says. “You got something to write with?”
“You don’t want to text it?” I tease.
His laugh rumbles down the phone, warming parts of me that have been cold for a long time. “Call me old-fashioned.”
I smile, grabbing a pen as he reads off the ranch name, the road, the county. I write it on a bright yellow Post-it and stick it to the edge of my monitor. Something about it tugs at me. The town name: Clover Canyon. My brain files it away, but a flicker ofsomethingremains underneath. A connection I can’t quite make.
“Get some sleep, Jenna.”
“You first.”
His laugh is low and warm, a sound I want to press between the pages of a book so I can listen to it later. “Night.”
“Night.”
The call ends, and the absence of his voice is so physical that it’s as if someone turned off the heat.
I frown as I stare at the address on the sticky note in my hand. The address is familiar.
My fingers are already on the keyboard. I pull up the internal project database—the one managed by VP Julian Vance’s division that I’m technically not supposed to access. But I built the filing architecture for the whole system last year, and nobody thought to revoke my permissions.
I type the road name. The results load in three seconds. I click before I can stop myself. My data analyst’s brain takes over, connecting nodes, following the trail, pulling one thread and watching the whole web shiver.
Cold crawls up my spine.
Water testing reports with dates that don’t match the inspection schedule. Correspondence between Vance’s team and a contractor I’ve never heard of, going back eighteen months. Payments to a geological survey company that doesn’t appear in any public registry. And buried in a sub-folder labeled HR-Archive—who hides things in HR?—a memo referencing “contamination protocols” and a ranch called Havenridge.
