Page 55 of Reluctant Bride

“You’re doing this now?” Tessa says, peering over my shoulder at the screen.

“Mick’s got a wife and a mortgage and a leg that isn’t the same shape it was this morning. Now is when I’m doing this.” I type Sullivan Transport crew, own family into the description and don’t think too hard about which word I meant.

“You’re terrifying,” Tessa says, with real affection.

“Somebody has to be, while everyone else is busy being sad about the right things.”

I close the laptop and take a pan out of Eli’s hands before he drops it. “How’s he doing?”

“Stable. Out of surgery. Leg’s bad, but stable.” Eli looks wrecked, a man who spent the afternoon in a hospital waiting room instead of at work. “Maren’s still at the hospital. Finn won’t leave either.”

“Half of Rimrock’s already dropped something off at his place for when he gets home,” Tessa says, setting her own pan down like a woman who’s fed this town through worse. “Somebody set up a meal train before the smoke even cleared.”

Dawson stands in the doorway with his sleeve rolled down over the bandage, saying almost nothing, watching his own town do the thing it does best. I’ve never seen him look more like a man carrying weight he refuses to put down in front of people who love him.

“You should eat,” I tell him.

“I’m not hungry.”

“You pulled a man out of a collapsing building this morning. Eat the lasagna.”

He eats the lasagna. He doesn’t argue with me about it, which tells me more about how the day sits on him than anything he’d say out loud.

I find the code an hour after everyone’s gone home, sorting through the scorched inventory Tate dropped off, running the exact cross-check I ran on the records office fire before anyone thought to ask my opinion on it. Nobody assigned me this. I do it because I’ve spent six days photographing Dawson’s desk for my father, six days that have somehow felt like an entire year of being married to the man. Reading a company’s wreckage for what it’s hiding is a skill I apparently can’t turn off just because the company in question is now, technically, also mine.

Most of it’s nothing I’d know what to do with even if I wanted to. Lift model numbers, hydraulic part codes, the boring architecture of a company that moves freight for a living.

Then there’s a fragment, half-legible on a scorched page recovered from the edge of the blast, a filing code that doesn’t match Sullivan Transport’s system at all. Older format. Different prefix. The kind of classification code you’d find on something a county archive would use, not a freight company.

I know that prefix. I’ve seen it once before, stamped on a folder Ashley’s office keeps for pre-statehood land grants, the ones so old they predate the county itself.

I take a photo of it before I let myself think too hard about what I’m doing.

My thumb hovers over dad’s name in my contacts, the same reflex that flagged Cruz’s gate log three weeks ago. Send it home. That’s the job.

I don’t send it.

I set the phone face down on the counter instead, like it might change its mind if I stop watching it. I stand at the window until the not-sending stops feeling like a decision and starts feeling like the only one I could have made.

Dawson finds me on the back porch swing a little after midnight, Cricket already asleep against my feet, the sky gone thick with stars and a crescent moon sitting gently on top of Broken Sky Mountain.

He doesn’t say anything at first. He just sits, close enough that our shoulders almost touch, not quite, that careful inch.

I pull in one long breath through my nose, hold it like I’ve trained myself to at five a.m. on a yoga mat for moments like this one, and let it out slow, four counts, the rhythm that gets me through a hostile hearing room without my voice giving anything away. It doesn’t make the next part easier. It just makes my voice steady enough to say it.

“I saw you,” I say. “In the wreckage.”

He goes still, breath barely audible. “I know.”

“I’m not asking you to be sorry you did it.” I keep my voice even, because if I let it shake he’ll hear an accusation in it that isn’t there. “That man had a gun in his pocket and Mick’s still in a hospital bed because of the explosion he ignited. I’m not telling you that you were wrong.”

“Then what are you telling me?”

“I’m telling you I saw what you are when the leash comes off.” I make myself look at him while I say it, because saying it to the side of his face would be cowardice with a better excuse. “I’ve seen the version of you that negotiates a contract clause by clause and gives away every advantage because it’s the right thing to do. I’ve seen the version that threatens a man’s arms over a hat and means every word of it and somehow makes it funny. Today I saw a third one. It didn’t look like either of those men.”

He doesn’t argue it. That’s the part that undoes me a little, watching him sit there and just take it, no denying it, no defending it.

“Are you afraid of me?” His voice comes out quiet, almost hesitant, nothing like the certainty he wears for the rest of the world. Not really a question. More like a man asking for a verdict he’s already decided to accept whatever it is.