Chapter 10
Ethan
It’s two in the morning. Jenna is asleep upstairs, one of the kittens curled in the bend of her knee. I checked eleven minutes ago. I’ve been checking every hour, standing in the doorway like a man confirming that something too good is still real.
Crowley is on the router. Pixel is on my lap, purring against my thigh with the engine-idle hum that signals she’s settled in for the night. My glasses are on, and the screens cast the room in blue-white light.
Today was Havenridge, and my chest still hasn’t recovered from seeing Jenna with my family. Seeing her hold Max and go still. Not frozen-still, but the other kind that happens when something fragile lands in your hands and your whole body forgets, for a second, that it was ever braced. She looked down at Max, and something in my chest hit a wall I didn’t know was there.
She laughed at something Shay said and meant it. She let Delaney refill her glass without flinching at the cost of a second pour. She sat in the middle of a room full of Suttons and didn’t count a single exit.
She fit. Not fitin. Fit. Like there’d been a Jenna-shaped gap in this family and none of us knew it until she stood in it.
That’s when I knew.
I’m running the security dashboard Beckett and I built: perimeter alerts on every access road, trail cameras on the east fence line, encrypted channels for his veteran watch network—former military men who treat a ranch perimeter like a forward operating base because that's what it is now.
Vance is still circling. Three days in town. Buying coffee. Smiling at waitresses. Asking, very politely, if anyone’s seen a woman with brown hair and glasses.
What’s keeping me up tonight isn’t Vance. I have eyes on his hotel and two of Beckett’s men on his tail every time he moves. What’s keeping me up is the math.
He found Jenna in less than thirty-six hours. That’s not luck. That’s a tip. And the only man in Havenstone County who sits at the center of every ledger, every loan, every land transfer, the only man who profits from a Sutton bad day, is Marlon Ennis at the bank.
I have no proof. Just a timestamp pattern that doesn’t line up any other way.
Marlon knows it too. He has to. This afternoon, he called Daniel—unprompted—to “helpfully mention” a corporate type taking coffee at the diner for two days running. Asking about property lines and water access. Asking about a woman with brown hair and glasses. Nothing Beckett didn’t already have. Nothing Marlon told us first.
Which means he’s panicking or trying to see how we move. Either way, I’ve added his name to the dashboard in red. A burned source is still a source if you handle it right.
I cross-reference the camera logs with the timeline Jenna gave me—LandCorp’s acquisition patterns, the dates that line up with pressure on both ranches. The flash drive is still in Dorito. I check the goat pen on the south camera. He’s standing in the corner, chewing something that is almost certainly not food, looking unbothered by the fact that critical evidence is working its way through his digestive system.
Patience. The drive will come. In the meantime, I build what I can with what I have: Jenna’s memory, Beckett’s contacts, and the security grid that now covers both properties.
And the part that still doesn't make sense to me: Ben and Dad are cooperating.
My father and uncle haven't shared a meal in over a decade. The last time they were in the same room, Daniel had to stand between them. But Beckett showed me the watch logs this morning, and there it was—Ben’s men covering the Havenridge west boundary while Dad’s crew handles Stoneridge’s south fence. Shared perimeter intel. Coordinated schedules. No overlap, no gaps. Two halves of the same thing, cracked apart by grief and pride, fitting back together because the threat to Sutton land overrides decades of silence. An uncle and a father who can’t say each other’s names at dinner but can coordinate a security grid in their sleep.
I close the dashboard and lean back. Pixel shifts on my lap, and Crowley opens one eye from the router, as if checking on me.
My mind keeps drifting back to the porch at Havenridge this afternoon. Jenna on the top step with Max against her shoulder and Kitty’s jar in her lap. The way she held that baby like he was made of glass and miracle, her chin resting on his head. She didn’t know I was watching. She was just sitting there, being held by a family she’d known for hours, and her face was doing something I’d never seen it do.
Nothing. No calculation. No exit math. No foster-kid arithmetic. Just a woman on a porch, holding a baby, being still.
I’ve watched her since January, through emails and phone calls, through the careful way she parcels out trust like someone rationing supplies for a winter she’s not sure will end. I’ve watched her learn to eat without being asked, sleep without a go-bag, and reach for me without flinching. But this afternoon was different. This afternoon, she belonged somewhere, and she knew it.
I need to marry this woman.
The thought isn’t new. But tonight it carries weight. Tonight it has a jar and a baby and four women who said, “Sit down.” Tonight it has a porch where she stopped counting.
I hear boots in the hallway. Heavy and deliberate. Gabriel’s walk. He appears in the study doorway, hat still on, jacket dusty from riding at two in the morning. His jaw is set in the way it’s been for weeks now, not anger, exactly, but something restless. Something looking for a direction to point itself.
He pours coffee from the pot on the sideboard without asking if it’s fresh. “You’re still up.”
“Working.”
He nods and drinks. The study is dark except for the light from the screens, and in it, my youngest brother looks older and harder than he should, as if he’s carrying something I can’t reach.
“Gabe.”
