Chapter 18 #2
“I’m not asking you to erase it.” I hold his eyes, and for the first time since I walked into this building, I let him see how much the last three days have taken out of me, no bravado, nothing managed.
“I’m asking you to help me find out who’s spending my name like currency before they spend it on something neither of us can walk back from. ”
Holt doesn’t answer right away. He looks at Mackenzie’s laptop, at the warrant still glowing on the screen, at the notary stamp from an office I’ve trusted for eleven years.
“Foster and Reyes doesn’t just hand out signatures,” he says finally. “Somebody there had to believe the paperwork was legitimate enough to stake their license on it.”
“Which means somebody handed them a story good enough to survive a licensed attorney’s due diligence,” Mackenzie says. “That’s not amateur hour. That’s patient.”
“That’s the same patience that had somebody photographing the boundary house before either father ever told us out loud where we’d be living,” Sage says.
She looks at her father for the first time since I walked in.
“This isn’t Cruz’s patience, Dad. Cruz doesn’t have access to Sullivan’s outside counsel.
He barely has access to his own case file right now. ”
Gideon doesn’t answer that directly, which from him is as close to agreement as the room’s going to get tonight.
Knox releases a breath I didn’t know he’d been holding, and his shoulders come down, not trust exactly, but the absence of the hostility he walked in wearing.
“I’m not clearing him,” Knox says. “Not tonight. Not off a theory about an attorney’s office.”
“I’m not asking you to,” I say. “I’m asking you to hold him where he is and let Mackenzie run the paper trail before either family does anything that can’t be undone.”
“And if the trail comes back to Sullivan Transport after all? Somebody inside your own walls who meant it?”
“Then I hand you that person myself and I don’t ask you to be gentle about it.
” I mean every word. “I’ve spent a year building something with you I’m not interested in losing to somebody’s frame job.
If it turns out to be real, it stops being a frame job and starts being a problem I clean up personally. ”
Knox studies me a long moment, the same assessing look Sage gives a hostile witness, inherited or taught, I’ve never been sure which.
“Twenty-four hours,” he says. “Mackenzie gets the trail. If it points at Cruz clean, he stays. If it points somewhere else, we talk about what happens to him next.”
“Twenty-four hours,” I agree.
Holt still hasn’t come off the door. When I look at him again, he gives me a short nod, more concession than agreement, the kind of nod a man gives when he’s decided not to draw a line tonight but hasn’t decided to erase the one he already drew either.
“For what it’s worth,” he says, and I can hear what it takes out of him to say it, “I don’t think it’s you. Not the whole way you. I think there’s a version of you that I haven’t met yet, and I’d like to keep it that way.”
“So would I,” I tell him, and it’s the truest thing I’ve said all night.
Sage doesn’t reach for my hand in front of the room.
She doesn’t out her arm in mine. I notice it the whole walk back to the truck, some new instinct in me reading her every expression.
She catches me noticing. She doesn’t look away, and for one second, gravel crunching under both our boots, something passes between us that has nothing to do with Holt or Knox or anybody else.
Just her eyes on mine, steady, promising this isn’t over, not the fear, not the rest of it.
She doesn’t touch me until we’re both inside my truck with the doors shut and the dome light fading out. Her hand finds mine on the console between us and squeezes tentatively, small in mine.
“You saw it too,” I say. “Holt.”
“I saw it.” Her voice comes out steadier than her hand feels. “He’s never done that. Not once, not in two years of me watching him walk into rooms that should’ve scared him.”
“He’s not wrong to.”
“I didn’t say he was wrong.” She looks at me, and there’s nothing soft in it, no reassurance she doesn’t actually believe. “I said I saw it. Those aren’t the same sentence.”
I start the truck. The dash clock reads a few minutes past two, and it’s been a long, fucked up day. The headlights catch the long stone front of The Ledger before I pull out, Gideon’s silhouette still standing in the open doorway, unmoving, already three moves into whatever comes next.
My phone buzzes in the cupholder before I’ve cleared the gate.
Mackenzie. Straight to it, same as always when the news won’t improve with padding.
Pulled the notary’s log from Foster and Reyes.
Whoever walked that warrant through wasn’t a Sullivan employee at all.
The intake sheet lists outside counsel representing a private client.
Client name’s redacted under privilege. But the retainer was paid from an account that’s been dormant since 1987.
I read it twice. Sage leans over to read it a third time with me, her shoulder against mine, and she goes still against me.
1987, I type back. That’s before either of our fathers ran a damn thing.
Mackenzie’s answer comes back in under a minute, three words with nothing soft left in them at all.
That’s the point.