Page 84 of Reluctant Bride

“What kind of paper?”

“Sweetgrass border crossing. The summer I came home from Boulder, my father put me on the night terminal to learn dispatch from the bottom, and two months in I caught one of our drivers running undeclared loads into Alberta under manifests he’d doctored himself. Cattle weights that didn’t match the trailer. Seals that had been broken and reset.” He says it like a man reading his own indictment back to himself. “I didn’t report it. I pulled the driver, rebuilt the route logs, and buried the whole thing so clean my father never knew it happened on his son’s terminal. That’s a federal customs violation with my handwriting on the cover-up. The paper Ashley had wasn’t the crime, Sage. It was the fix. Every log I rewrote, in order.”

“Declan would have ended you.”

“Declan would have ended me quietly. The feds would have ended Sullivan Transport in public. I was twenty-four and I’d already decided which of those I could survive, and it was neither one, so I did what she wanted and told myself it was the only move on the board.”

“And I never told you after, not that summer and not in all the years since, because telling you meant handing Gideon Blackwater’s daughter the only paper in Montana that could end my father’s company. I loved you. I still couldn’t put that file in a Blackwater’s hands. That’s the part I’m least proud of, Sage. Not that I folded. That I trusted you and didn’t trust your name.”

He rubs a hand over his jaw. “What I don’t have is who handed her those logs. Ashley never had access to a Sullivan terminal in her life. Somebody inside our own system pulled them and put them in her hands, and that same somebody paid her, twice, eight years apart. Tate’s three days into an account that was built not to be traced, and every time I think I’ve got the shape of it, it moves. I promised you the day I knew who. I still don’t know who.”

“I believe you.”

“You shouldn’t just believe me. You should make me earn it.”

“I did make you earn it. You’re telling me before I have to drag it out of you. That’s the earning.” I set my mug down. “I’m going to see her.”

He goes very still. “Alone?”

“Alone. On purpose.” I hold his eyes, watching him choose, deliberately, not to argue it. “Ashley’s never once told the truth to a room full of people. She might to one woman with nowhere else to look.”

He crosses to me instead of fighting it, close enough that I catch his cedar scent and the coffee he never finished, and his hand finds my jaw like it did the day he checked me for a concussion.

“Call me the second you’re out,” he warns. “Not the second something goes wrong. The second you’re out, whether anything went wrong or not. Same as always.”

“Deal.” I catch his wrist before he can drop his hand and press a kiss to his palm, quick and fierce. “We’ll go through whatever she gives me together. Tonight. All of it, side by side, no more pieces handed out separately.”

“Together,” he says, like he’s signing something.

Ashley’s office smells like toner and the same perfume she’s worn since high school, and she looks up from her desk with the bright, arranged smile she’s worn at every function since I was old enough to recognize it as a costume.

“Sage. I heard congratulations are in order.”

“They are.” I take the seat across from her instead of standing over her, because today isn’t about winning fast. “Sullivan Ranch. Three weeks.”

“How wonderful. You’ll want the good florist out of Great Falls, not the one here in town, she’s booked solid through October.” Ashley folds her hands on the desk, every inch the county clerk who’s never once had to survive an actual consequence. “I always knew you two would end up back together. Some things you just can’t outrun.”

“Is that supposed to be a compliment?”

“It’s supposed to be an observation.” Something behind the smile goes cold, brief and gone. “You always did get the things the rest of us only got to watch.”

And there’s the old cruelty, dressed up as nostalgia. I let it sit in the room a second before I answer it.

“I’m not here for flowers, Ashley.” I set two printouts on her desk. Two wire transfers, one from the summer I was twenty, one from last week, same shell company, same account, same handwriting of a lie stretched across eight years. “Highline Consulting. Tell me about it.”

The smile doesn’t survive contact with the paper. I watch it go, piece by piece, until there’s just a woman my husband’s age who looks, for the first time in my whole life knowing her, actually young.

“I never met him,” she says, finally, voice gone thin. “A man called me that summer, the one you and Dawson spent sneaking around behind everyone’s back. Said he had documents on Dawson. Said if I got close enough to end things between you two before it went any further, there was money in it. I thought it was jealousy dressed up as a job. I thought I was finally going to get him.”

“And instead?”

“Instead I was never the point.” Her hands aren’t steady, both flat on the desk like she needs the wood to hold her up. “Whatever Dawson already told you, it’s true. Route logs from the border, something he fixed and never reported, enough to end him with Declan and end the company with everyone else.”

“He told me. I want the piece he doesn’t have.” I hold her eyes. “The photograph. Where did it come from?”

“I didn’t take it.” Her voice cracks and her eyes go to the clock above her door and back so fast I almost miss it. “It came already printed, in the same envelope as the documents. I’ve never owned a camera capable of that shot, and I’ve never once stood close enough to either of you to take it myself. I don’t know where it came from and I never wanted to know.”

I think of the ridge above our house, the exact angle that first photograph would have needed, the same sightline whoever sent that she’ll like it there again text already knew before either father said a word about the house.