Page 59 of Reluctant Bride

“So would I,” I tell him, and it’s the truest thing I’ve said all night.

Sage doesn’t reach for my hand in front of the room. She doesn’t out her arm in mine. I notice it the whole walk back to the truck, some new instinct in me reading her every expression. She catches me noticing. She doesn’t look away, and for one second, gravel crunching under both our boots, something passes between us that has nothing to do with Holt or Knox or anybody else. Just her eyes on mine, steady, promising this isn’t over, not the fear, not the rest of it.

She doesn’t touch me until we’re both inside my truck with the doors shut and the dome light fading out. Her hand finds mine on the console between us and squeezes tentatively, small in mine.

“You saw it too,” I say. “Holt.”

“I saw it.” Her voice comes out steadier than her hand feels. “He’s never done that. Not once, not in two years of me watching him walk into rooms that should’ve scared him.”

“He’s not wrong to.”

“I didn’t say he was wrong.” She looks at me, and there’s nothing soft in it, no reassurance she doesn’t actually believe. “I said I saw it. Those aren’t the same sentence.”

I start the truck. The dash clock reads a few minutes past two, and it’s been a long, fucked up day. The headlights catch the long stone front of The Ledger before I pull out, Gideon’s silhouette still standing in the open doorway, unmoving, already three moves into whatever comes next.

My phone buzzes in the cupholder before I’ve cleared the gate.

Mackenzie. Straight to it, same as always when the news won’t improve with padding.

Pulled the notary’s log from Foster and Reyes. Whoever walked that warrant through wasn’t a Sullivan employee at all. The intake sheet lists outside counsel representing a private client. Client name’s redacted under privilege. But the retainer was paid from an account that’s been dormant since 1987.

I read it twice. Sage leans over to read it a third time with me, her shoulder against mine, and she goes still against me.

1987, I type back. That’s before either of our fathers ran a damn thing.

Mackenzie’s answer comes back in under a minute, three words with nothing soft left in them at all.

That’s the point.

NINETEEN

SAGE

The first line of the letter erases a hundred and fifty years of family history, and I read it out loud to the man I was raised to ruin.

The Ledger holds its temperature no matter the season, cool enough that I regret not grabbing a jacket, dry enough to keep paper alive since before Montana was a state. Dawson favors the bandaged forearm without meaning to, holding it stiff at his side.

“You’re supposed to be resting that arm,” I tell him, for the third time since we walked in.

“I’m not doing anything with the arm. I’m supervising.”

“You don’t supervise. You hover and call it supervising.”

Dawson doesn’t move from the table. “Hovering is a legitimate skill. I’m very good at it.”

“Hovering isn’t a medical term, Dawson.”

“Neither is you diagnosing me off a suture kit and a YouTube video.”

“I’ve stitched worse than your arm on animals twice your size. Sit down before I make you.”

He doesn’t sit down. He leans against the reading table instead, which is at least some kind of progress, and watches me work through the 1868 to 1890 shelf with the infuriating tranquility of a man who’s decided arguing with me isn’t worth the trouble this early. We have until tonight. Knox gave Dawson twenty-four hours in The Ledger’s stone hallway before he decides what happens to Cruz, and Gideon wanted the old land surveys cross-checked against the basement request before that clock runs out, some paper trail nobody’s touched since before either of us was born.

It should have taken twenty minutes. It’s been two hours, and I keep catching myself watching the wall clock instead of the shelves, like staring at it hard enough might slow it down for Cruz’s sake.

I find the box because it’s shelved wrong, tucked one row higher than every other Blackwater correspondence file from the period, like somebody wanted it close enough to find and far enough to miss. Plain wood, no markings. Inside, a water-stained leather folder holds the paper. No label. A Blackwater hand from six generations back, some ancestor whose exact place on the family tree I’d have to look up, taped a scrap inside the lid, three words.

Not for filing.