Chapter 12 Graham
CHAPTER TWELVE
GRAHAM
The first photographer showed up the next day.
I spotted him from the barn. A man in a gray jacket leaning against a rental car parked just beyond the property gate, long lens pointed at the main house. He wasn’t hiding. Didn’t need to. The county road was public land. He could stand there all day and there wasn’t a thing we could do about it.
Later, a van with tinted windows had joined him, parked on the shoulder a hundred meters down the road. The photographer next to it did not look like he was there for love.
“Maybe we shouldn’t have tagged Gracen Ranch in all the new videos,” Jamie said, staring through the kitchen window.
“That was the whole plan,” Dex said. He was at the table, laptop open, scrolling through social media feeds.
“Tag the ranch so the new content buries the first video. Drive searches toward Fraser Kincaid with horses instead of the barn footage with Rose.” He looked up.
“Nothing we can change now. They’re here. ”
It mattered. Not the how. The what. What it was doing to Rose.
I found her coming out of her office. Her face was the mask I hadn’t seen since the first week. Controlled, distant, every emotion locked down tight.
“Two more cancellations for next month came in by email,” she said. “The Feldmans and the Morrison party. Both citing ‘changed circumstances.’”
Changed circumstances. Polite language for your ranch is a circus and we’d rather not.
Two bookings gone. Probably twenty-five thousand in revenue wiped out overnight. On top of seventy-two thousand stolen. On top of an insurance crisis.
Partly because of me.
My name. My face. My fifty million followers who thought they owned a piece of every place I’d ever stood.
“Graham.” Dex’s voice, low enough that only I could hear. “Don’t.”
“Don’t what?”
“Whatever you’re doing in your head right now. The guilt spiral. The ‘this is all my fault’ calculation. Don’t.”
“It is my fault. Every photographer out there is here because of me.”
“They’re here because they found our location. That’s not the same thing.”
Dex was right about the guilt spiral. He was wrong about it not being my fault. But standing in the kitchen arguing about it wasn’t going to help Rose, and it wasn’t going to answer the question that had been gnawing at me since the insurance lapsed with a little too much convenience.
I helped Hank replace a gate hinge after breakfast, then went looking for Olivia.
I found her in her cabin, laptop open on the small desk alongside a legal pad covered in her handwriting.
She’d turned the space into a quiet command center.
Printouts from the Colorado Secretary of State’s business registry fanned across the bed, cross-referenced with notes I couldn’t read from the doorway.
She looked up when I knocked.
“Close the door,” she said.
I did. Leaned against it. “Something doesn’t fit.”
“Sit down first.”
I sat on the edge of the bed, pushing aside a stack of printouts.
“The Taylor firing,” I said, before she could start.
“Denise’s reaction. She went from devastated girlfriend to crisis manager in about ninety seconds.
Tears, then ‘I’ll pull his access logs, every system, every timestamp.
’ Like she’d already thought through the steps before she walked into the room. ”
“Or like she’s competent and handles stress well,” Olivia said. She was playing devil’s advocate, not because she believed it, but because she needed me to be sure. “Some people compartmentalize. It doesn’t make them guilty.”
“It doesn’t. But Taylor’s face, Olivia. That wasn’t the face of someone who got caught. That was the face of someone watching a trap close on him. He looked at Denise and said, ‘You know what you fucking did.’ Not to Rose. To Denise.”
Olivia was quiet for a moment. “I went deeper.” She pulled up a screen on the laptop, and turned it toward me.
“Remember when I told you I might not find anything? I was half right. The surface-level filings are clean. Ridgeline Supply checks out as a registered LLC, the hay company has a real address, the farrier service exists. On paper, everything looks legitimate.”
“But?”
“But I kept going. Cross-referencing registration dates, looking at registered agents, checking for patterns.” She tapped the screen.
“TKM Digital Solutions. It’s listed as the registered agent for Ridgeline Supply, the fencing company that overcharged Rose by forty percent.
TKM is also listed as the registered agent for two other vendors I found in the filings.
Three companies, all registered within six months of each other, all using TKM as their agent. ”
“And TKM is—”
“Registered to Taylor Marsh, like I told you. But here’s what got my attention.
TKM was filed with the Colorado Secretary of State on March twelfth.
” She flipped a page on her legal pad. “Taylor Marsh started working at Gracen Ranch on June first. I confirmed the date with Hank. Said Taylor showed up right after Memorial Day weekend.”
I stared at the screen. “TKM was registered three months before Taylor set foot on this property.”
“Correct.”
“So Taylor planned the entire embezzlement scheme before he even had a job here, before he had access to any systems, before he knew what the payment structure looked like, before he’d ever seen an invoice—”
“Or someone else set TKM up and brought Taylor in to be the name on the paperwork.” Olivia’s voice was flat. “I don’t think Taylor is the architect, Graham. I think he’s the fall guy.”
“Denise.”
“Probably Denise. But probably isn’t proof.
” She held up a hand before I could speak.
“I know what you’re going to say. Go to Rose, show her the timeline, let her draw the conclusion.
But think about what she’d actually see.
She’d see that Taylor was planning this before he got the job.
That he targeted the ranch, maybe even used Denise to get access. ”
“That’s insane.”
“Is it? From Rose’s perspective, it’s actually more believable than her best friend running a long-term embezzlement scheme.
People believe the version of reality that hurts less.
Always.” Olivia met my eyes. “You need the connection between Denise and TKM. A signature, a bank account, a name on a filing that puts her fingerprints on it. And we don’t have that yet. ”
“So what do we do?”
“I’ve requested the full incorporation documents for TKM from the Secretary of State’s office.
Takes a few business days. If Denise is listed anywhere, organizer, registered agent before Taylor, bank signatory, we’ll have it.
” She paused. “In the meantime, you keep your eyes open. Watch Denise. See if she makes a mistake.”
“Fine,” I said. “We wait.”
“We wait smart,” Olivia corrected. “There’s a difference.”
Denise came by the main house that afternoon.
I was in the kitchen when she walked in through the side door with her usual brisk energy, laptop bag over one shoulder, a paper grocery sack in the other arm.
“Hey,” she said, giving me a quick smile. “Rose around?”
“Office, I think.”
“Good. I need to go over the Rousseau cancellation paperwork with her.” She set the grocery sack on the counter.
She started unpacking.
“She’s been skipping meals again,” Denise said, stacking the items on the counter with the casual efficiency of someone who’d been doing this for years.
“I can always tell because she starts buying those horrible tasting gas station protein bars. That’s stage one.
Stage two is she stops buying those and just drinks coffee until she shakes. ”
I watched her fold the empty grocery bag into a neat square and tuck it into her pocket. A habit. The kind of thing you do without thinking because you’ve done it a thousand times.
“Can I ask you something?” I said.
“Sure.”
“How long have you known her?”
“Six years in January.” Denise pulled out a chair and sat, crossing one ankle over the other.
“I showed up here when the ranch was nothing. One functional cabin, no website worth mentioning, and Rose working eighteen-hour days trying to do everything herself because she didn’t trust anyone else to care about it the way she did. ”
“Sounds familiar.”
“She’s always been like that. It’s not a phase.
It’s architecture.” Denise’s expression shifted into something I hadn’t seen on her face before.
Not the bright competence, not the concerned-friend performance.
Something softer. Tired, maybe. “I applied for the job because I needed a paycheck and she was the only person hiring within fifty miles. I stayed because —” She stopped. Shook her head.
“Because?”
“Because the first week I worked here, I watched Rose sit up all night in Cassiopeia’s stall during a colic scare.
Didn’t sleep. Didn’t eat. Just sat on the floor with that horse’s head in her lap, talking to her, rubbing her belly, refusing to leave until the vet cleared her at six in the morning.
” Denise picked at a thread on her jacket sleeve.
“I’d never seen someone love something that hard and be that scared of losing it at the same time.
It was like watching someone hold their whole heart in their hands and know that any second it could stop beating. ”
She looked up at me. “That’s when I decided I wasn’t leaving. Because someone had to make sure Rose didn’t burn herself down keeping everything else alive.”
I didn’t say anything. Couldn’t, for a moment.
Because the woman sitting across from me didn’t look like a criminal. She looked like someone who loved Rose.
I felt the ground shift under my certainty.
What if I was wrong?