Page 80 of The One Who Saw Her: Boone

"Blow up?" Colter rolled his eyes. "You're acting like we're fragile little snowflakes. This is exactly why we stick together."

"You bring the papers and the story," Eli said. "We bring the firepower. Stop acting like you're the only one with skin in this game."

Boone exhaled, letting some of the tension leave his shoulders. "The only reason I'm not kicking both your asses right now is that I'm wearing my good shirt and I don't want to wrinkle it."

Owen looked back and forth between them and laughed. "The Callahan brothers in Big Sky. I guess pigs can fly. Take a seat."

The three of them looked at the impossibly small leather couch in the corner, looked at Owen, and collectively decided to stand. Even so, their combined presence ate up half the room.

Owen propped a hip against his desk, with professional ease sitting comfortably on him the way it always had. "What brings you this far? You never come to Big Sky unless you're forced by cattle, taxes, or funerals."

Boone's eyes drifted to the mantle of framed photos. He let them land on the last one—a wedding shot he'd seen a dozen times on social media but had never let himself really look at. Owen in a fitted tux, his wife beaming and his parents flanking them with the uncomplicated pride of people who hadn't had to bury anything to get there.

And right in the center, perched on Owen's hip like she'd been born knowing exactly where she belonged, was a little girl with soft curls and a gap-toothed grin.

A whole life—a whole world Owen had built on the other side of everything Boone had been stuck wading through. It shouldn't have hit him as hard as it did—this sweet, ordinary, painfully normal snapshot—but it punched straight through his rib cage anyway.

He saw what it looked like when someone got out and managed to build something beautiful.

"Your stepdaughter?" Boone asked.

Owen lit up. "Julia. She just turned five and is smarter than me and entirely unimpressed by my law degree."

Boone felt the twinge before he could stop it—a quiet, involuntary ache at the warmth in Owen's voice. The kind of easy, uncalculated affection that said this man had figured out something Boone hadn't gotten to yet.

"She's a terror. Bought me these for Christmas." Owen walked around his desk and took a seat, then leaned back and flung his feet up, revealing the ugliest pair of pink alligator boots Boone had ever seen in his life. The man smiled like he loved every second of it. "No fashion sense but a hell of a sweetheart. Makes up for everything else."

Owen glanced at the photo, and with a big-ass grin dropped his boots to the floor with a thud.

"How's the family?" Eli asked, because that's what you did in Montana.

"Dad retired a few years back. Spent the first few years driving Mom crazy so she bought him an RV. Said he could hit the road a few weeks a month or get himself a divorce."

Colter laughed before he could stop it. "Let me guess, he got a campground membership."

"Pops always was the smart one," Owen said, the grin fading into something quieter and more real. "Sorry about your parents."

"Thanks," all three Callahans said in unison, the way they always did when there was nothing else to say.

"It was Julia's birthday party or I would've been there. I did send flowers though."

"You didn't send shit," Boone said. "Your pretty wife did."

Owen chuckled. "Left to me I'd have probably sent sunflowers to a funeral." He straightened, letting the moment settle. "Look, we both know you didn't drive all the way to Big Sky to shoot the breeze. How can I help?"

Boone shoved the stack of papers across the desk. The weight of decades pressing in the silence between them.

"Property lines, water rights, the whole damn mess," he said, keeping his voice flat and steady. "The handshake deal has been in play for over fifty years."

Eli leaned against the wall. "You sure you're not just here for the dramatic scene? Because I'd pay to watch you collapse under that mountain of paperwork."

"Yeah," Colter added. "You gonna faint, or are you going to let Owen do his thing?"

Owen picked up the first document, expression already shifting into the lawyer version of himself.

"Handshake deals," he said slowly, like he was tasting the words. "They're tricky. Especially when both men involved are dead. Without oral testimony, proving what they actually agreed to is a hard hill to climb."

"Maybe this helps." Colter reached down, picked up a dusty banker's box from the floor, and slid it across the desk.