Page 80 of Reluctant Bride

“I want to run the Erin audit past you before I set anybody loose on it,” I say, halfway through the second glass. “Not after. Before.”

She sets her fork down. “That’s new.”

“I know it’s new. I’m working on it.” I hold her eyes. “Tate takes her route access. West takes cameras and permission logs, quiet, nothing that pings her own system. Holt runs her service record against real military channels instead of the civilian file. Mackenzie cross-references federal. Finn just talks to people, because half this valley underestimates him and tells him things they’d never tell the rest of us.”

“You already built the whole plan.”

“I built a draft, and it’s already got a hole in it.” I turn my glass by the stem, watching her instead of the wine. “Tate ran her badge against every gate on the property this afternoon. Every access point routes through Erin’s own authorization, clean, no surprises. Except one. A single county-level pull, the same week as the wedding, that never touched her login at all. Somebody used her name without needing her permission to do it.”

Sage goes very still. “That’s not a plant hiding behind Erin. That’s a plant hiding behind the plant.”

“That’s what it is. Which is the whole reason I’m not moving on her tonight. I want to know who’s standing behind the woman before I put my hand on her.”

She’s quiet a second, turning the wine glass by its stem, and when she looks back up there’s only honesty and that same look of determination.

“Add one thing,” she says. “Whatever we find, wrong or right, I hear it from you the same day. Not filtered. Not softened.”

“Same day. I promise.”

“You’ve said that before too.”

“I’ve kept it since the day I actually meant it.” I reach across the island and take her hand, thumb tracing the ring I picked out fast and plain and never once regretted. “I’m not the man who decides what you can carry anymore, Sage. I’m just slow learning how not to be him.”

“That’s not fear talking. That’s growth. Don’t undersell it.”

“Both.” I hold her hand tighter than I mean to. “I’m afraid, Sage. Not of Erin. Of whoever’s standing behind her patiently enough to spend eight years on this. I keep running the math on what happens if I miss the thing that matters because I was too busy being jealous of a woman on a trail run.”

She doesn’t say anything to that. She just turns her hand over under mine and laces our fingers together, and it says more than anything she could have handed me in words.

She lets go of my hand to get up and comes back from the office with a folder I know by its edges before she’s set it down. Green county tab. Fourteen months of my freight rates and her hearing transcripts, the whole war in one file.

“Your clause,” she says, sitting back down across the island from me. “The last one. The Corridor. By us, in this house, no fathers, no lawyers. I’m calling it.”

“Now?”

“You cooked. I’m feeling generous.” She opens the folder and squares it with the edge of the counter, Gideon’s rule, and something in me that’s been braced since the tack room finally stands down. “Terms. Sullivan Transport gets the road back. Full access, both directions, every season, no permit renewals. In exchange, Blackwater cattle cross at the north gate on the rotation schedule, and your freight rates on our contracts go back to what they were the week before I opened my mouth in that hearing room.”

“That’s not a negotiation. That’s a surrender with a signature line.”

“It’s what’s fair.”

“It’s what wins.” I turn the folder around and read it, because she’d read mine. “You gave me everything I asked for fourteen months ago and kept nothing for your side. That’s not you. You bury roads.”

“I buried your road because it was the smartest move available to a woman who’d watched you walk past her at the county fair with Ashley on your arm.” She says it level, no heat in it, a fact entered into the record. “I don’t need to win this one, Dawson. I need it to be over.”

I go to my office and come back with my own draft, the one I wrote the night after the fence splice and never showed anyone. She reads it the same way I read hers. All the way through, twice.

“You gave me the road,” she says.

“I gave you the north half. The southern stretch stays Sullivan, the northern stretch deeds to you, and the easement dies because there’s nothing left to ease. You’d own the thing I spent fourteen months fighting you for.”

“That’s worse than mine.”

“It’s what’s fair.”

We look at each other across two drafts that each hand the other side more than either of us ever asked for, and she starts laughing first, helpless, one hand over her mouth.

“We’re terrible at this,” she says. “Both of us. Neither of us can stand to win it.”