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“Temporarily.”
“Temporarily,” she agrees. But she doesn’t move her hand from the rail, where it has ended up an inch from mine, and neither do I. We stand there with that inch between us, and the ring on her finger catches the light from the window every time she breathes.
After a while, guests drift toward the preview pens. Darkness has come down beyond the lights, and truck lamps shine through dust stirred by boots and hooves. I put my hand at the small of Tessa’s back as people pass us. She approved it. Knowing that does nothing useful for the hunger it wakes.
She stops beside eight bred heifers. “Pretty,” she says, soft enough to sound newly distracted.
The employee guarding the buyer lane grins at the ring and lifts the chain. “You can get a closer look, ma’am.”
Yesterday he’d have sent the auditor around to the office. Tonight he lets my fiancée walk right in, because he assumes the McCall name has made procedure optional.
She takes a picture for the engagement story, my shoulder and her ring and cattle behind us. I see the focus land on the ear tags. Two new numbers sit over old holes that have already healed.
“Lot 206,” she murmurs when we reach the next aisle. “Second and seventh animals have old tag holes. New numbers use the same prefix as one of Mott’s closed accounts.”
I have Cole hold the group overnight for a vet review. No public hold. No movement.
The cover worked. I should be satisfied.
Instead I keep thinking about how fast people gave her access because they believed I’d put my name on her. She used it. I hate it anyway.
We get back to the house after eleven. Tessa checks the paper seal on her exterior door before she puts the key in. Intact.
She opens the door and stops.
Over her shoulder, I see the sink. A single black ear tag lies on the white porcelain. A strip of dried hide is still caught around the stem, one edge dark with old blood. Under the clean air of the room there’s a sour trace I know from every bad spring of my life.
It came off a dead calf.
Tessa doesn’t go in. She photographs the room from the doorway and calls Mercer. Her voice stays level. Her free hand is a fist at her side, the knuckles white. I want to open it and hold on. I don’t, because I don’t get to.
I stop Cole at the bottom of the stairs and close the wing from both ends.
Only after Mercer confirms he’s on his way does she look at me. “Who knew which room was mine?”
“Security. Household staff. Family at dinner. Anyone who saw the exterior stair last night.”
“And anyone tracking my evidence case.”
The tag under her case turns cold in my mind.
If I tell her now, I contaminate a threat scene with my own violation and burn whatever trust survived this morning. If I don’t, I’m using her ignorance again. I look at her fist, and at the ring above it, and I choose wrong.
“Yes,” I say. The truthful answer is also a lie.
I look at the ear tag from the hall. It isn’t a state number. The clipped crown at the top belongs to a Barbed Crown nursery batch, the black temporary tags we use on calves. I remember the invoice because Calvin accused the supplier of charging twice.
Mott reported that whole batch destroyed.
Chapter 7
Tessa
The first morning after Garrett put his hands on me begins with biological evidence in a paper sack and four hours of sleep in a chair. Romance survives the comparison better than it should.
Mercer cleared my suite at 3:12 and took the ear tag, the hide attached to it, and swabs from the sink. The connecting door was still locked from my side, but its latch carries a narrow scrape that could be a week old or an hour old. I spent the rest of the night in the records room with my case under my legs.
At 7:20, I find the invoice. Barbed Crown ordered three hundred black nursery tags, rejected them for a printing defect, and got full credit. Six days later, Mott signed a statement that the tags were destroyed. No weight ticket. No burn record. No witness. One sentence, his initials, a date.
