Page 36 of Reluctant Bride

“County business doesn’t keep ranch hours.” Her gaze slides past me to Sage, barefoot in my shirt, glasses pushed up her nose, hair a mess I put there myself an hour ago, and something in Ashley’s face does a small, careful thing. Not jealousy. Not quite. Something colder and more controlled than that, shuttered as fast as it opened. “Sage. You look well.”

“I am well.” Sage doesn’t move an inch closer to the door, doesn’t fold her arms over the shirt, doesn’t do a single thing to make this easier for anybody but herself. “What’s in the envelope, Ashley?”

Straight for it. That’s my wife. No small talk, no coffee offer, just a woman standing in her husband’s shirt refusing to pretend this is normal.

“The county’s copy of your marriage filing. I thought you’d want it for your records, given everything.” Ashley holds it out, manicured and patient, like she drove twenty minutes past our last locked gate for the pleasure of handing us a photocopy. “I could have mailed it, but I was in the area.”

Rimrock is thirty-two hundred people and a diner with a chalkboard. Nobody is ever just in the area of the boundary house at seven in the morning.

I take the envelope so Sage doesn’t have to reach past me for it, and Ashley’s eyes track the movement of my arm the whole way, the same slow inventory as before. My skin goes tight under it in a way that has nothing to do with the cold morning air.

“Thank you,” I say, even enough that it isn’t actually thanks. “We’ve got it from here.”

“Of course.” She doesn’t leave. She glances at Sage’s glasses, at the hem of my shirt riding her thigh, and that bright smile recalibrates, fast and professional, like a truck route rerouting around a closed gate. “You two look happy. I’m glad. Truly.”

The word truly sits wrong, a bad note in a room full of good ones. I’ve known this woman my whole life, since grade school, since long before either of us understood what our families’ names would take from us, and I already know what her truly usually ends up meaning for somebody.

“We’re managing,” Sage says, and I watch her weigh every second of this exchange like she weighed the tack room, like she weighed Cruz’s silence in the truck. She’s not saying anything yet. She’s just holding it, quiet, patient, like everything she plans to bring back out later at exactly the moment it does the most damage.

Ashley finally steps back off the porch, heels finding gravel with the ease of a woman who’s never once had to watch her footing in her life. “Enjoy your morning,” she says, and there’s nothing in the words that should bother me and everything about how she says them that does.

She’s halfway to her car before Sage shuts the door.

“You want to tell me what that was?” Sage asks.

“That was Ashley being Ashley.”

“That was Ashley looking at you like she was pricing you.” Sage crosses her arms now, glasses catching the morning light, and there’s no jealousy in her voice, just the same forensic tone she used dismantling a diner full of gossips. “And you looked like you wanted to put a shirt on and a continent between you.”

She’s not wrong. I’m not telling her that.

“I don’t like people showing up unannounced.” True. Not the whole truth. I’ve gotten very good, over the years, at handing people true things that aren’t the whole thing, and I hate how easily it comes out of me now, aimed at her.

Sage studies me a second longer, the same look she gave the fence splice yesterday, patient, calculations running behind her eyes. Then she lets it go, same as Cruz’s non-answer in the truck, keeping instead of forcing.

“I have a call in an hour,” she says instead. “Go put on a shirt before you traumatize any more visitors from the clerk’s office.”

I go put on a shirt. Then I take it back off, lace up, and go for a run instead, because the alternative is standing in my own kitchen thinking about how Ashley looked at me, and I would rather run a mountain trail on no breakfast than do that.

I take the creek trail into the drainage at a pace that leaves no room for anything but footing and breath, and by the time I loop back my skin’s slick with sweat and my head’s finally clear. Fifty-eight minutes, eight miles, twenty-five hundred feet of vertical according to the Garmin. None of it outruns what’s riding along with me. It just quiets down enough to be useful.

I shower fast, dress faster. Dark jeans, a belt, a light button-down in pale grey cotton I roll to the forearms without thinking about it, muscle memory older than the tattoos underneath. I trade my Garmin for my Patek last, out of habit more than vanity, plain steel on a worn leather band, no diamonds, nothing that shouts. My father gave it to me the day I made partner in everything but name. Understated was the whole point. Loud men get robbed. Quiet men get trusted.

The call comes at nine.

Eli, breathless, no greeting. “Records office. It’s on fire.”

I’m in the truck before he finishes the sentence, and Sage is already grabbing her boots off the mat by the time I hit the front door, because she heard my voice change and didn’t need the rest of the sentence explained to her.

“You’re not coming,” I say.

“I’m already in the truck.” She’s already in the truck. “Drive.”

I drive.

Rimrock’s volunteer department gets there before we do, four trucks and half the men who used to play football with me and Eli, hoses already snaking across Main Street, smoke rolling black and thick off the roofline of the county records building like the whole structure is exhaling something it’s been holding for decades. The crowd’s already three deep on the sidewalk, phones up, faces lit orange.

Eli’s running the barricade line, waving trucks through gaps that didn’t exist thirty seconds ago, shouting names I don’t catch over the roar of the fire eating through a hundred years of paperwork.