3. Jessika
THREE
JESSIKA
I walk the property line at dawn.
I'm up before the alarm, I’m always up before the alarm now, have been since the divorce, since the first night I slept alone in the Atlanta apartment and realized that silence has different textures depending on what you've lost, and I pull on boots and a ranch jacket and walk the property the way my father used to every morning, checking the fencing, checking the horses, checking the shape of things.
The light coming over the tree line is gray-pink and thin, the kind of autumn light that doesn't quite commit.
The grass is heavy with last night's rain.
I put six horses in the pasture to the north, Callie, the quarter horse rescue my dad brought in last spring, and five others at various stages of rehabilitation, lift their heads as I pass.
Callie walks the fence line with me for a while, snorting soft steam in the cold air.
"Morning," I tell her.
She bumps her nose against my shoulder.
This is what I miss about ranch life. The uncomplicated honesty of animals. You give them care and safety and they give you back their presence, their trust, no agenda, no performance, no careful management of anyone's feelings.
I spent fourteen years managing people's feelings.
Fourteen years as a family attorney in Atlanta, which means fourteen years of sitting across tables from people whose marriages and families and carefully constructed lives were falling apart, helping them divide what they'd built together into something that could be carried separately.
I was good at it. I am still good at it.
I just ran out of runway for doing it to myself.
The barn comes into view as I round the eastern pasture, and I stop.
The main doors are still latched, nothing forced, no obvious damage. But on the north-facing side of the wall, the older boards, the ones the renovation money hasn't reached yet, there's something dark and irregular. I cross the wet grass toward it.
Burned into the wood.
Not burned as in accidental. Burned as in deliberate, a brand, or something like it, deep char marks cutting into the gray siding in blocky, uneven letters.
HE SHOULD'VE STAYED GONE
I stand in the cold light and look at it for a long time.
My first thought is Grant. Because Grant Vance is back in my head now, put there by last night, and because this phrase, this warning, reads like something directed at him. The man who already has a reputation in this county that precedes him into every room. The man people already want gone.
My second thought is slower and more uncomfortable.
Who saw him last night? Who knew he was at the station with Nova? Who's been watching this property?
I take out my phone and photograph it. Four shots from different angles, the weak morning light doing its best. Then I stand back and look at the surrounding ground, the grass pressed down in places, two distinct impressions in the soft mud near the northeast corner of the barn, boot-shaped, larger than mine.
Someone was here last night.
During the storm.
While I was at the sheriff's station.
While Nova was sitting in an interview room with Grant Vance, with my father asleep and the ranch empty.
My stomach does something cold and specific.
I go inside and make coffee.
My father comes down at seven, moving slowly with the cane he refuses to call a cane—"it's a walking stick," he said the day the occupational therapist brought it, as though the distinction matters, and finds me at the kitchen table with my phone and a mug and the controlled expression I use in courtrooms.
"You're up early," he says.
"I'm always up early."
"You look like you're thinking hard."
"I found something on the barn." I slide my phone across the table. "Vandalism. Burned into the north wall."
He picks up the phone. Looks at the photograph. His face, already carved from seventy-two years and a stroke that took three months of his functionality and has given most of it back, doesn't change much. But something in his eyes shifts.
"When did this happen?" he asks.
"Last night. During the storm."
He sets the phone down. Picks up his coffee mug. Goes to the window above the sink the way he does when he's thinking about something he doesn't want to say.
"Dad."
"I'll call Harlan about replacing those boards."
"That's not—" I stop. Steady myself. "That's not what I'm talking about and you know it."
Silence.
"Dad, someone was here last night while I was out. They came onto this property and they burned a warning message into our barn. That's threatening. That's trespassing at minimum. We need to call the sheriff's department."
He turns. "And say what?"
"And say someone vandalized our property."
"And what will they do about it?"
"Dad—"
"Jessika." He uses the particular voice he used when I was a teenager pushing at something he decided was closed. It used to infuriate me. It infuriates me now, but I’m older now, and I have enough experience with difficult people to wait it out.
"This county has its particular politics. Filing a police report makes noise. Noise brings people around. I rather it just, settled.”
"Settled." I look at him. "Someone threatened us."
"Somebody's got a grudge about something. Let it alone and it'll pass."
"Like Morgan's situation passed?"
The room goes very quiet.
My father's face closes up like a door. "That's different."
"You said the same thing about Morgan. Let it alone, it'll settle down, boys get into trouble?—"
"Jessika."
"He's been gone for months, Dad. And you won't talk about it.
You won't call anyone. You just act like if we don't mention it, it isn't happening, and I have tried to respect that because you were sick and I didn't want to—" I stop.
Take a breath. "But something was burned onto our barn last night.
Something that looks like a warning. And I need you to help me understand why someone would do that. "
The silence stretches.
My father turns back to the window.
"Your brother made choices," he says finally. The voice is careful. Contained. The voice of a man who's been containing something for a long time. "Some of those choices put him in the way of people who aren’t good, certain kinds of people."
"What kind of people?"
He shakes his head. "I don't know the specifics."
"Don't know or won't say?"
No answer.
I pick up my phone and my coffee mug and stand. "I'm going to take Nova to school and then I need to drive to Calwell and find out who holds the feed delivery contract and see if there's any way to restructure the payment schedule. Can you handle the morning rounds?"
"I can handle the morning rounds," he says quietly, like I've wounded something.
"I know you can." I soften it a little. He's recovering. He's scared about the ranch as much as I am, and he carries it the way men of his generation carry everything, straight through the center, without bending. "I'm not trying to take over."
"I know."
"I just need—" I pause. "I just need to understand what we're dealing with."
He turns then, and his face is older than usual. The stroke took some of the squareness of his jaw, the particular certainty he used to carry. He looks like a man with more questions than answers, which is not a look I've ever seen on Presley Mills's face before.
"So do I," he says quietly.
Nova comes downstairs in yesterday's clothes, she does this sometimes, the subtle test of whether I'll make an issue of it, with headphones around her neck and an expression designed to preemptively communicate that she doesn't want to talk.
I hand her coffee without comment.
She takes it, surprised.
We have toast and don't discuss last night. I watch her out of the corner of my eye: the way she moves around the kitchen, careful and self-conscious, the way she keeps glancing toward the window like she's checking the outside. She's rattled. She's trying very hard not to be rattled.
In the truck on the way to the consolidated middle-and-high school in Calwell, twenty-two minutes each way, which has become the only unguarded time we share, Nova watches the fields go by and finally says: "Is he going to be in trouble? Grant? For what he did?"
"I don't think so."
"Because it was self-defense?"
"Because the man he intervened with has a criminal record. The deputy seemed inclined to view it that way."
Nova nods slowly. "Good."
"Nova." Gentle. "What happened out there? Before he found you."
Her jaw tightens. "I don't want to talk about it."
"Okay."
She looks at me sideways, expecting a fight. I don't give her one. I've learned slowly, expensively, that Nova shares things on her own timeline and pushing accelerates the timeline only in the direction of shutdown.
A mile passes.
"There were a lot of people I didn't know," she says finally.
"This girl at school, Kayla, she said it was just a bonfire, some of the older kids, chill.
But when we got there it was—I don't know.
It felt wrong. The way some people were acting.
" She picks at the hem of her sleeve. "There was this guy who kept coming around.
Older. Like, not-a-teenager older. And he was being—" She stops.
"Friendly in a way that didn't feel friendly," I say.
She looks at me. Something in her face relaxes slightly at being understood. "Yeah. And I tried to leave, but I didn't have a ride and Kayla was, I don't know where Kayla went. And then it was just me and this guy and?—"
"And Grant showed up."
"Yeah." She's quiet for a moment. "He came out of nowhere.
Like I didn't hear a car or anything. He was just there, and he looked at the guy and he said something really quiet, I couldn't hear what, and the guy sort of laughed it off.
Like Grant was the unreasonable one. And then Grant said something else and I don't know what it was but the guy changed. Like, the air changed."
I grip the steering wheel a little tighter.