Page 150 of Ironwood Ranch Cowboys

In the trees.

At the trail.

In the edge of another photo weeks ago where I told myself maybe I was spiraling because that felt more polite than admitting I might actually be right.

“Come on,” I mutter to the screen.

I zoom further.

The face is still just off enough. The camera caught the fence line sharper than the figure, prioritizing motion where I asked it to. Composition over paranoia. Rude.

My pulse has gone strange. Fast and thin.

I lift my head and scan the area beyond the pens.

People everywhere.

Workers, riders, families. Movement layered over movement until nothing stands still long enough to trust.

Then I see him again. A familiar line of shoulder turning away near the back gate.

I move before I think.

Camera against my chest, weaving through bodies, skirting the rail, ignoring somebody calling my name because whatever this is matters more than politeness and I’m so tired of being watched by a ghost.

“Excuse me, sorry, can I just…?”

I cut behind the chute line, around a stack of feed bags, out toward the side path that runs behind the announcer’s platform.

There.

A man disappearing past the equipment trailers.

I raise the camera and fire two quick shots while moving.

Useless angle, too much distance, too much dust.

Damn it.

I lower the camera and push faster, boots slipping in churned dirt for half a second before I catch myself. My bag bangs against my hip. Somebody swears as I cut too close to a fence rail. I don’t care.

By the time I hit the back path, he’s gone.

I stop hard, breathing too fast, and turn in a full circle like that might somehow make a grown man materialize in the open just because I want him to.

Nothing.

Only trailers, packed gravel, distant arena noise, the low mechanical sound of the generators, and one old cottonwood stirring in the breeze like it knows something I don’t.

I look down at the camera screen with shaking hands and pull up the last two frames.

Blur, motion, a shoulder.

Not enough to know if I’m really being followed.

CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

Cody