I carried the folder to my desk, where my monitor glowed over a tidy landscape of sticky notes, paper clips, and the little ceramic cactus Amanda had given me after Julian because she said I needed something that thrived on neglect and looked unfriendly to touch.
The cactus had been a joke.
It had also outlasted my relationship.
I set the West Ridge materials down and rubbed one thumb over the edge of the blue cover. The project had been background noise in the office all week, one of those development names that floated through conference rooms and calendar invites without meaning much to the person formatting page numbers. Cascadia had projects all over the region. Some involved commercial pads, some residential clusters, some conservation language that made everything sound gentler than it probably was.
I didn't work strategy. I didn't sit at the table. I processed documents, tracked signatures, formatted spreadsheets, caught typos before Monica's red pen found them, and made sure people who had opinions about margins never had to speak directly to printer settings.
That was my lane.
My safe, climate-controlled lane.
I opened the folder and started with the index.
The first pages were normal enough: cover memo, meeting agenda, preliminary timeline, project overview, revised access appendix, external broker summary, land-use map, stakeholder contact sheet.
I checked each item against the attachment list.
Everything matched.
The document smelled faintly of toner and warm paper. My coffee sat untouched near my keyboard. Outside the window, Larch Bend's main street baked under July sun, bright awnings fluttering over shopfronts and parked trucks. Somewhere beyond the buildings, the mountain rose green and steady. Somewhere beyond that, or maybe closer than I wanted to think about, the P-Patch sat under the same sky with its blue sign, its raised beds, and Zane's land running down toward Beargrass Lake.
I turned the page.
External Broker Summary.
The first line stopped me.
External Contact: Fletcher McCrae, Owner/Broker, McCrae Land Brokerage.
The office sounds thinned.
Keyboards still clicked. A phone still rang twice near reception. Someone laughed in the breakroom. The air conditioner still blew cold air over my shoulders.
I stared at the name until the letters stopped looking like letters and started looking like the glow of Zane's phone screen in the shed.
Fletcher.
Not a random Fletcher. Not a client named Fletcher with a harmless last name and nothing to do with Zane.
Fletcher McCrae.
Zane McCrae.
My fingers tightened on the page, wrinkling the corner before I made myself let go.
"No," I whispered.
The page didn't care.
I looked toward Monica's office, but the glass was frosted and her voice was a muffled rhythm behind the door. Amanda was nowhere in sight. Nobody looked at me. Nobody knew that the papers under my hands had just reached across my tidy desk and grabbed me by the throat.
I read the broker summary again.
McCrae Land Brokerage had supplied revised access assumptions for the Beargrass corridor.
Beargrass.
