Luke glances up from the phone in front of him. "Coffee's fresh," he says.
It catches me off guard, that small normalcy in the middle of everything. I feel something loosen slightly in my chest. The simple human decency of three men who could have made me feel like an outsider in this room choosing instead to make me feel like I belong in it.
Jace stands slightly apart from all of them, leaning against the far counter with his coffee untouched beside him. When his eyes find mine across the room the look in them tells me everything his voice hasn't said yet.
It got worse overnight.
"Tell me," I say, because there is no version of this where I stand in the doorway and wait to be included, not anymore, not after last night. Everything we said in the dark and the decision I made to stop treating this like something happening around me instead of something happening to all of us.
Jace straightens off the counter and crosses the room and hands me the phone with the trail camera footage already pulled up on the screen. The brothers let him do it without a word, which tells me they've already decided I'm part of this conversation.
I look at the images one after another. The cold that moves through me has nothing to do with the early morning air coming through the kitchen window.
Because the person in those images isn't Colt Ramirez.
It's someone else entirely.
And somehow that makes everything more dangerous than it was before.
Wade is the one who lays it out. Wade has never been the kind of man who softens information by making you wait for it, and right now I'm grateful for that even as the weight of it lands hard.
Someone broke the padlock on the equipment shed on the main property overnight. A clean break, not forced in a hurry but worked at deliberately. The kind of entry that takes patience, the right tool and someone who knew exactly what they were doing.
Nothing was taken. That's the part that sits wrong. A break-in with nothing missing isn't a robbery, it's a search.
The trail cameras on the land told the rest of the story.
The same figure from the footage Jace showed me this morning had been moving along the tree line at the edge of the property in the early hours. Not toward the house but toward the far corner of the lot where the ground had been disturbed when Jace first found the buried evidence weeks ago.
Luke had gone out at first light and found it, a fresh hole dug alongside the original site, not deep but deliberate, like someone trying to put something back or add to what was already there.
"They're planting something," Jace says, his voice flat and certain in the way it gets when the anger in him is being held very carefully in check. "Whatever they couldn't retrieve they'rereplacing with something else. Something that points back at me. Look at the pictures." His phone moves toward me.
The room is quiet after that, the kind of quiet that happens when a truth lands that changes the shape of everything around it.
Brooks stands with his arms crossed, already thinking three moves ahead the way he always does. "If they can tie that land to illegal activity and make it look like it originated with you, the whole acquisition gets questioned. Everything we've built on it, everything we planned for it, all of it becomes evidence in someone else's story."
"And Jace takes the fall," Luke says quietly, not as a question.
"That was always the plan," Jace answers, and something in the steadiness of his voice when he says it tells me he's had a few hours alone with this information already and has moved past the shock of it into something colder and more resolved.
I look around the kitchen at these four men, at the way they move around each other without thinking about it. The unconscious ease of people who have been solving problems together their entire lives. I feel the full weight of what this means, not just for Jace and the investigation, but for all of them, for the ranch and the land and the thing their father built and left in their hands.
Someone is trying to use the McCallister name to cover their own tracks.
And they have been planning it for a very long time.
It's Wade who breaks first.
Not in the way that means falling apart, because Wade McCallister doesn't fall apart. In the way that means the thing he's been holding back since he walked through the door stops being holdable and comes out with the particular force of a man who has been patient longer than feels natural to him.
"You should have told us sooner," he says, and he's looking at Jace when he says it, direct and unambiguous. The way Wade always is, the way that would feel like an attack from someone else but from him is just the truth delivered without wrapping paper.
Jace holds his gaze. "I know."
"We found buried evidence on McCallister land and you sat on it."
"I was handling it."
