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Aldridge files his response to Colbeck’s interim order—forty-seven pages, which tells me exactly how worried the Houston firm is, because forty-seven pages is not confidence, forty-seven pages is a firm that has been asked to defend a position it no longer fully believes in and is compensating with volume.

I file my response.

I go for a dignified, not-desperate twenty-two pages.

Clean, tight, sourced to the historical record, now running to four supplemental exhibits.

I know it’s good because Mac reads it and says, “No notes.”

Mac always has notes.

“Yo, Taya.” Mav knocks on my open door and walks into my office.

“What’s up?” I swivel my shoulders, having just pushed the send button on my response to High Mesa.

He sets his cowboy hat on the corner of my desk. “Wanted a quick chat. The Planning Commission published the resort permit application this morning. Two hundred and forty units, private airstrip, golf course, the whole thing.”

“Yeah, I saw that. I think they did it because the judge isn’t going their way…well, not entirely.”

He folds his arms. “These assholes are making it all sound like progress, which it ain’t.”

I toss up my shoulders. “They’re getting ahead of the narrative. I remember doing that once or twice in my previous line of work.”

He grins. “Which is why you’re so good at what you do now!” His expression turns serious. “This stuff is hairy as fuck, I’m not always clear about it, which is why you’re my lawyer.”

I laugh as I pull up the resort permit on my laptop and turn it toward him. “See that.” I point at the water allocation section. “The only senior right in that corridor with the volume and priority date to support this is Clara Whitman’s 1948 decree.”

Mav studies the screen. “So without Clara’s water, their three-hundred-million-dollar development goes down the toilet.”

“Yeah.”

I look at my watch—I have a call in ten minutes. “Anything else?’

He studies me carefully, his eyes narrow. “How are you doin’, darlin’? Really?”

I level him with a flat, unimpressed glare. “Doing just fine, Maverick.”

“Yeah?” He tilts his head, as if trying to discern from my face if I’m telling the truth. “You sure about that?”

I grit my teeth. “Yeah, I’m sure.”

His expression shifts, just barely, mouth curving with control. “So, what you’re sayin’ is that you don’t want to talk about him.”

I give him a look that could’ve curdled milk. “I really don’t.”

“Fair.” He picks up his hat from the corner of my desk where he set it. He moves toward the door. Then stops. Turns. “You know what’s funny?”

“What?” I snap.

He smiles—the way one does when they know they’re about to say something that’s going to land. “You said you don’t want to talk about him.” He puts his hat on. “But you didn’t say you weren’t thinking about him every minute of every Goddamn day.”

I shoot him a withering look. “Get out of my office, Mav.”

I hear him laughing halfway down the street.

“Nothing funny about this,” I mutter.

And there really isn’t, because what he doesn’t know—and I won’t admit at gunpoint—is that I’ve been sleeping with a T-shirt Mason forgot at my place like a pathetic Scarlett O’Hara who knows better and does it anyway.