“I'm doing an exam, Uncle Holt.”
“On one of our animals.”
“On a lame animal entered into a rodeo event,” she said, not looking up from the folder.
“He was certified sound four days ago.”
“He was certified sound four days ago with an injury that existed four days ago.” She closed the folder. “I'm pulling him from the event.”
Holt's jaw moved once. “That's going to draw attention. The Fourth is in three days and people are already looking for reasons to?—”
“To what?” She turned then, and I watched Holt absorb the full weight of her attention. “To notice that an injured animal was entered in competition? Because I'm trying to prevent that, not cause it.”
“There's no need to make this more than it is.”
She took a breath through her nose, and I could see the precise effort it took. I'd seen her do this with difficult animals too—that deliberate pause before she decided how much force the moment actually required.
“Holt.” I said it quietly, just the one word, and stepped to where I was standing at Sadie's shoulder. Not in front of her. Just there. “She's the vet on record for this event. This is her call.”
He looked at me the way men like Holt look at men like me—assessing who I was and deciding I wasn't enough to be a real problem. “I know who she is, Dallas.”
“Then you know she's right.”
Something shifted in his expression. He didn’t agree, but he appeared to be recalibrating. Holt Hollister didn't want to make a scene at the Mustang Mountain rodeo grounds three days before the Fourth with other competitors and volunteers within earshot. He wanted a quiet correction. What he had instead was Sadie standing her ground and me standing next to her with neither of us showing any sign of moving.
He looked at Sadie. “We'll talk about this later.”
“I'll be here,” she said.
He left the way he'd come, and the heat pressed back in to fill the space.
Sadie was quiet for a moment. Then she pulled the folder back open and held the certification page and the brand registration side by side, and I watched her figure out what I already had.
“The brand doesn't match,” I said.
“No.” Her voice had gone flat. “It doesn't.”
“The registered owner on the paperwork isn't a Hollister operation.”
“I know.” She looked at the steer, then back at the pages. “I know what operation that brand belongs to. And I know who loads Hollister stock.” She closed the folder slowly, and when she looked at me her jaw was set but her eyes held something raw that she'd kill me for noticing. “This animal came off our trailer, Dallas.”
“Yes.”
“And these papers say he came from somewhere else.”
“Yes.”
She didn't say anything to that. She didn't need to. We both knew what forged livestock papers meant… what they opened the door to… what they implied about who'd known and for how long. She was already running the math. I could see it in the way she held herself, the slight squaring of her shoulders, the look of someone calculating the shape of a problem that keeps getting larger the more she dug into it.
“I need to look at the other five,” she said.
“I figured.”
“And the rest of the entered stock before Friday.”
“I'll pull the folders as soon as we're done here.” I held the gate open again and she came through with the folder under her arm. She stopped just outside, and for a moment she stood in the full hammer of the July sun with her hand tight on that folder and her eyes somewhere else, working through something she wasn't going to say out loud yet.
I didn't push her. I'd never pushed her. That wasn't my job and it wasn't who I was.
