Page 14
She’s exhausted. There’s a smudge of motel-lot dust along her jaw, and she’s standing in a room I control only because I own the walls around it. I stay in the doorway. Every muscle I have wants to cross the threshold and put my hand on the back of her neck and tell her nobody gets to her here. Wanting her isn’t permission to make the imbalance invisible.
“The breeder sale is in eleven days,” I say. “Cattle start arriving three days before. If I cancel, I have consignors with deposits, buyers with plane tickets, and lenders who will supply their own explanation.”
“You want me to keep quiet.”
“I want time to learn whether Lot 118 is one bad account or a rotten system. I’m not asking you to change a finding.”
“Then give me untouched access. Intake, accounts, settlement, scale, vehicle logs. Nobody warns Mott what I’m testing. The suspect cattle stay held.”
“How long?”
“One day. If I can’t verify it by then, I recommend shutdown and the law decides what’s next.”
A day is long enough to lose a record and short enough to save a business.
I take the master records-room key off my ring and put it in her palm. I close her fingers around it and let go before I do something stupid, like hold on.
“One day starts now.”
She looks down at the key, then up at me. “You understand what you just handed me.”
“The only copy of that key that isn’t mine.”
“The ability to put your family’s business under a light you can’t aim.”
“I understand.”
“Why?”
Because my father hired you instead of telling me. Because you looked at a brand in the dark and saw what three hundred men walking past it every week didn’t. Because you said no to me twice in one day and I haven’t been told no since I was nineteen, and I liked it more than I’ve liked anything in months.
“Because he wrote your name on that note,” I say. “Not mine.”
She closes her hand around the key. “Goodnight, Garrett.”
“Lock both doors.”
“I was going to.”
“I know. I just needed to say it.”
I go down the hall. I don’t go to bed.
The house is dark and too big, the way it’s been since the funeral. My father’s reading glasses are still on the kitchen windowsill because nobody can bring themselves to move them. I check the kitchen door that swells in damp weather. I check the east camera that loses the drive when dust coats the housing. I walk the family wing at midnight and again at one, and both times I stop outside the connecting door to the guest suite without meaning to.
There’s a line of lamplight under it. She’s still awake.
I stand there with my hand flat against the wood, not on the knob, and I listen to the small sounds of her moving around: a zipper, a chair scraping, the tick of a laptop key. Ordinary sounds. Somebody alive on the other side of a wall I own.
I tell myself I’m listening for threats.
Then I go to my room and lie on top of the covers in my clothes and stare at the ceiling until the window goes gray, and the tag Cole put under her case sits in the back of my mind like a stone in a boot.
Chapter 5
Tessa
At eleven minutes past six, I find the first account Mott has tried to bury.
