Chapter 16
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
GRAHAM
Two weeks.
That’s how long I’d been sitting in my mother’s kitchen staring at a loch that didn’t care.
The house hadn’t changed. Stone walls, low ceilings, the smell of peat and damp that I used to hate as a teenager and now couldn’t imagine living without.
My mum had taken one look at my face when I walked through the door, made tea, and left me alone.
She hadn’t asked why I was home. Hadn’t asked about Colorado.
Hadn’t asked about the woman whose name I couldn’t say without my voice doing something I didn’t want it to do.
Scottish mothers. They know when to push and when to disappear.
I hadn’t touched the channel. Hadn’t answered emails.
Hadn’t logged into anything with Fraser Kincaid’s name on it.
My phone buzzed constantly, Dex, Jamie, Olivia, sponsors, my publicist, my agent, two podcast producers, and someone from Netflix who wanted to “explore opportunities.” The world wanted Fraser Kincaid, and Fraser Kincaid didn’t exist right now.
The only calls I made were to Rose.
Every day for the first week. Then twice a day. Her phone went straight to voicemail every time. Either she’d turned it off or she’d blocked me, and I couldn’t decide which was worse.
I kept calling anyway. Hung up before the beep. Just to hear the recording. Just to hear her voice say her own name in that clipped way she had, like even a voicemail greeting was something she needed to control.
You’ve reached Rose Gracen. Leave a message.
I never left one. What would I say? I’m sorry I brought the cameras. I’m sorry I brought the circus. I’m sorry my face was the last thing you saw before everything fell apart.
I’m sorry I wasn’t enough to make you let me stay.
Dex drove up from Edinburgh at the end of the second week.
He let himself in without knocking, a liberty he’d earned after ten years of keeping my life from falling apart, and found me in the same chair with the same view.
“You look like shite,” he said.
“Cheers.”
He sat across from me and opened his laptop on the table. The screen was filled with spreadsheets, email threads, and analytics dashboards. The machinery of a career I hadn’t touched in weeks.
“We need to talk about the channel,” he said.
“No we don’t.”
“Graham.” His voice was patient in the way that meant he’d rehearsed this. “The sponsors are restless. Red Bull wants a timeline. Patagonia wants a timeline. Everyone wants a timeline.”
“Tell them I’m on creative retreat.”
He turned the laptop toward me. “Jamie’s put together some pitch ideas. Low-effort stuff. A Q&A, a behind-the-scenes of previous trips, a ‘what’s in my gear bag’ video. Things you could film from this kitchen in an afternoon.”
“I can’t.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“Both.” I pushed the laptop back toward him. “Every time I think about sitting in front of a camera and performing, I feel physically ill. Like my body has decided that being Fraser Kincaid is something it’s done doing.”
Dex studied me. “Is it?”
“I don’t know.” I stared out the window. “Maybe. Probably. Fuck, I don’t know.”
“That’s a lot of I don’t knows for a man who used to make decisions while hanging off the side of a cliff.”
“Cliffs are simple. You either hold on or you fall. This is...” I shook my head. “I don’t know how to be the guy who tells millions of people about his adventures when the only thing I can think about is a woman in Colorado who won’t answer her phone.”
Dex closed the laptop slowly. Sat with that for a moment.
“Jamie and Olivia want to come up this weekend. Talk content strategy.”
“Tell them to stay in Edinburgh.”
“They’re worried about you.”
“They can worry from Edinburgh.” I stood up, carried my cold tea to the sink, and poured it out. “I’m not ready to be Fraser Kincaid yet. I might never be ready. And I need you to be okay with that for now.”
Dex nodded slowly. Not happy. Not arguing. Just accepting the reality of a man who’d hit a wall and couldn’t see over it.
“Okay,” he said. “For now.”
The third week, I called Olivia.
“I need Kaya’s number,” I said. “Rose’s assistant. From the ranch.”
Olivia didn’t ask why. She just gave it to me. “We traded numbers before we left. She’s good people, Graham. Whatever’s happened, she’s on Rose’s side.”
“That’s why I’m calling her.”
Kaya picked up on the second ring. I could hear the clatter of dishes in the background, voices, the hum of a busy room.
“Graham.” Her voice was warm but tired. “Hang on, let me step outside.”
A door opened and closed. The noise faded.
“Sorry. I’m working the lunch shift at Milly’s Diner.” She said it matter-of-factly, but the weight of it landed hard. Kaya, who’d run trail rides and managed a ranch and kept Rose’s world spinning, was waiting tables.
“How are you?” I asked, though I already felt like I knew.
“Employed. Which is more than I expected two weeks ago.” I heard her breathe. “You’re not calling to check on me.”
“How’s Rose?”
Kaya was quiet for a long beat. The kind of quiet that meant she was deciding how much to say.
“Graham, the bank called the loan. The insurance lapse triggered a review clause. They demanded full repayment. Two hundred and forty thousand dollars. Thirty days.”
I sat down. “So I heard.”
“She couldn’t cover it. Not even close.”
I closed my eyes. “Kaya—”
“She sold the ranch.”
Four words. Quiet. Final.
“A developer named Garrett Wilson. He’s turning it into a wellness retreat.
” Kaya’s voice was steady, but I could hear the effort it took to keep it that way.
“He closed fast because Rose needed him to. The horses are gone. She found homes for all of them. Good homes. She spent more time on that than on anything else. Made sure every single one went somewhere safe.”
I was six thousand miles away, and the ranch I’d fallen in love with was already becoming something else.
“Cassiopeia?” I asked.
“A family called the Kittridges. Veterans’ therapy program outside Bozeman, Montana.
Rose vetted them herself.” Kaya’s voice cracked for the first time.
“Brutus went to Steadfast Ranch outside Pueblo. At-risk teens. The director, Carmen, took one look at him and said the kids were going to love him. Starlight is with Donna in Wyoming. And Ricky went to a family called the Brennans in Fort Collins, for their daughter Hally. She’s eleven.
Trauma survivor. Rose read every application like she was placing children, not horses. ”
Brutus. Twelve hundred pounds of stubborn, magnificent horse who’d rested his head on my shoulder while I talked to a camera, and eleven million people had watched and fallen in love with.
The horse who tested everyone and trusted almost no one and had decided, for reasons I’d never fully understand, that I was worth following.
He was working with teenagers now. In Pueblo. Being steady and patient for strangers the way he’d been steady and patient for me.
I put my head in my hands.
“Brutus is in a good place,” Kaya said quietly, reading the silence. “Rose made sure of it. She made sure of all of them.”
Of course she had. Because that’s who Rose was, even while her world was collapsing.
She’d have lost sleep over it. Made calls.
Driven out to inspect barns and meet owners and watch how they handled feed buckets and spoke to animals.
She’d have given away pieces of her heart, one horse at a time, and called it the responsible thing to do.
“She’s not in Colorado anymore, Graham. She left about a week ago. Went to her cousin Maggie’s place in Manhattan.”
“She’s not answering my calls.”
“She’s not answering anyone’s. Hank tried. I tried.” Kaya’s voice softened. “She’s in survival mode. When Rose gets hurt badly enough, she goes somewhere inside herself where nobody can reach her. She shuts down and waits until she can breathe again.”
“Is she safe?” My voice didn’t sound like mine.
“Safe? Yes. Maggie won’t let anything happen to her.
” Kaya paused. “But Graham, she’s not okay.
She hasn’t been okay since you left. And losing the ranch.
..” Another pause, longer this time. “That place was everything she had. It was proof that she could make something that lasted. And now it’s gone. ”
“I should have stayed.”
“No.” Kaya’s voice was firm. “You leaving was the right call. The photographers were making it worse every day. Rose knew that. She’d never admit it, but she knew.” She took a deep breath. “You can’t save someone who won’t let you, Graham. You can only be there when they’re ready to let you try.”
“And if she’s never ready?”
“Then you tried. And that matters more than you think.”
We were quiet for a moment. I could hear the wind on her end. She was still standing outside the diner, probably getting cold, giving me time she didn’t have on a break she couldn’t afford.
“Kaya. Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me. Just don’t give up on her.”
She hung up.
I sat there for a long time. Then I called Malcolm Hale.
He’d already been working the TKM Digital trace since I’d hired him on the drive out of Colorado, and I needed to know where things stood.
“Malcolm. Where are we?”
“Moving, but slower than I’d like.” His voice had the measured frustration of a man who was used to getting results and didn’t enjoy explaining why he hadn’t.
“The corporate filings are done. We’ve mapped every shell company connected to TKM and traced the vendor relationships.
That part is clean. The problem is the banking side. ”
“What’s the hold-up?”
“Bank signatory records are protected under federal privacy law. First Mountain Bank won’t release account holder information without a court order, and getting a judge to approve a subpoena for personal financial records requires showing probable cause of fraud.
My team filed the motion ten days ago. The judge assigned to the case has a backlog, and Colorado courts don’t move fast on financial crime unless there’s an active prosecution. ”