Chapter 20
TWENTY
MAREN
My phone has forty-one notifications before I've had coffee.
I count them the way I count everything that's about to hurt. Fast and without sentiment, scrolling past three from Laney, one from a county commissioner I haven't spoken to since spring, and a screenshot from Finn that I don't open because I already know what it says before I see it.
The document is a single page. Sullivan Transport letterhead, my signature at the bottom, a routing authorization dated the night before the shipment vanished. Clean formatting. Correct font. The kind of forgery that isn't trying to fool an expert. It's trying to fool a headline.
I read it twice, standing in my kitchen in a clean shirt and leggings, showered, hair still damp. My pulse doesn't spike. It drops, slow and cold, the quiet my body goes when the threat is real and the panic would only cost me time.
Knox reads it over my shoulder without asking permission. His jaw goes tight, the tell that means he's already three moves into a response I haven't agreed to yet.
"That's not your signature," he says.
"I know."
I set the phone down before my hand can decide to shake.
"Holt forwarded that to you last night." I watch his face while I say it, because his face is where he keeps the things he doesn't say. "You read it while I was asleep. And you let me sleep."
"Yes."
"Tell me why I'm not angry about that."
"Because waking you at two a.m. buys you four more hours of being framed and zero more hours of fixing it." He holds my gaze, steady, no apology anywhere in it. "You'd have made the same call."
I would have. That is the single most annoying thing about him before coffee.
"Next time," I say, "wake me anyway."
A beat. "Okay." And because it's Knox, one word is a signed contract.
It's good work, whoever built it. That's the part that steadies me more than anything else could. A sloppy lie would send me spiraling. A well-built one is a puzzle and puzzles I can solve.
Knox catches my wrist before I can reach for my keys, turns me toward him, and doesn't say anything soft.
He just looks at me the way he's looked at me since a conference room eight days ago.
Like he's confirming something he already decided a long time ago and doesn't need new evidence to keep believing.
"They're going to come at you from every direction today," he says. "I need you to let me hear about it. Not read about it after."
"I don't check in, Knox."
"I know." His thumb moves once against my pulse. "Start anyway."
We walk out together and split at our trucks without a word about it. There's nothing to say, this is just what mornings look like now.
Down the driveway, through the Sullivan gate, and onto the county road, where his taillights peel north toward Blackwater land and I go south, five miles of fence line and open range before the turn into the paved complex that holds the Sullivan Transport offices and the truck yard.
The last thing I hear from him before the distance between us does its work is not goodbye. It comes through my phone as I'm making the turn, a text, one line.
I'm not going to doubt you. Not once. Don't waste energy wondering if I will.
I read it at the gate to the lot, engine idling, and let it sit there a second longer than I need to before I drive in and let the rest of the day try to take it from me.
By the time I've made it to my office down the hallway, three people have already looked away from me.
Only Jennifer, who runs dispatch and has never once been afraid of anything, meets my eyes and says, "That's not your signature. I've seen your signature a hundred times, that loop on the M is wrong," which is the single most useful sentence anyone says to me all morning.
Dawson is waiting in my office when I get there.
He's already got his laptop open, three tabs of the document pulled up side by side with an older Sullivan Transport authorization file, and he doesn't waste time on how are you, which I'm grateful for, because I don't currently have an answer that wouldn't be a lie.
"The M loop is wrong," he says. "Jennifer's right. And the letterhead font is off by half a point size. Whoever built this had access to an old template. Not the current one."
"How old?"
"I don't know yet." He turns the screen toward me. "But it's not this year's system. This is legacy formatting. We haven't used that header since before the website redesign."
I sit down across from him and pull the laptop closer. My hands are steady. I make sure of it before I let him see them.
"Three years," I say, tracing the margin spacing with one finger. "Maybe four. This predates the last two software migrations."
"Which means someone had access to archived files."
"Or someone kept a copy for four years, waiting for a reason to use it."
Dawson looks at me for a long moment. My older brother has our mother's eyes and our father's patience and right now he's using both of them to measure exactly how much of me is holding together and how much is performance.
"You didn't do this," he says. Not asking. Confirming.
"No."
"I know." He says it simply, the way you say something that was never actually in doubt. "I told Dad that an hour ago."
Something in my throat goes tight and I don't let it show on my face. If I start feeling grateful for the people who believe me, I'm going to have to feel the weight of everyone who doesn't, and I don't have room for both today.
"Knox believes me too," I say, before Dawson can not-ask any louder. "Completely. Hasn't hedged once."
"I gathered that from the photo that's been circulating since yesterday.
" Dawson's mouth twitches, not quite a smile.
"Half of Rimrock has opinions about a Blackwater standing that close to a Sullivan on a cabin porch.
None of those opinions include him doubting you.
Everyone in this county expects a Blackwater to doubt a Sullivan the second it's convenient.
That's the whole architecture of the truce.
He's not supposed to be the one holding the door. "
"He's not doing what he's supposed to do a lot lately."
Dawson doesn't smile. That's not his register. He just holds my eyes a second longer than the sentence needs, the way he does when he's deciding whether something is worth pressing and clearly decides it isn't.
"No," he says. "He isn't." Then, already turning back to the laptop: "Finn already has a theory. I'd brace yourself."
"Is it a good theory?"
"It involves the word destiny. Unironically." He doesn't look up. "I told him I'll fire him if he says it to your face."
"You can't fire him. He doesn't work here."
"I'll find him a job here specifically so I can fire him."
That gets an actual laugh out of me, short and surprised, the first one all morning. Dawson's mouth twitches again in a way that might almost be satisfaction at having produced it.
Knox texts at ten forty. Ted gave Holt a fourth name. Not McKenna's. One of ours. Handling it.
I stare at that longer than the sentence should require. One of ours. He doesn't explain further and I don't ask him to. I know what handling it means in Knox's vocabulary and I know he'll tell me the rest when there's a rest worth telling.
Be careful, I type back.
Always am.
You are not. You have a bullet wound that says otherwise.
Three dots appear, disappear, appear again.
Fair, he sends, finally. Then: Still on for tonight? I'll bring dinner.
Depends what Dawson finds.
Copy.
A few seconds later: Eat something.
I set the phone down and go back to the archive.
My father calls at eleven.
I answer on the second ring because letting it go to three would look like hiding, and Declan Sullivan does not tolerate the appearance of hiding in his children, even when the hiding is entirely reasonable.
"The journalist who ran the first story," he says, no greeting, "just discovered his mortgage got called due this morning. Interesting timing."
"Dad."
"The county records clerk who was supposed to verify the document's authenticity received a call from Senator Halloway's office an hour ago.
Apparently there are questions about the office's staffing budget that need looking into.
" A pause, the sound of him turning a page somewhere.
"And I understand two of the three outlets that ran with this are suddenly finding their advertising contracts under review. "
I close my eyes.
"You didn't have to do all of that in one morning."
"I didn't do it to prove you're innocent," he says.
There's no warmth in it, which is somehow more comforting than warmth would be.
"I did it because a Sullivan was publicly accused, and that is an attack on this family regardless of whether the accusation is true.
If you were guilty, I would be making exactly these same calls. "
"I know."
"Good. Are you handling it?"
"I found the header discrepancy. Dawson's cross-referencing archive dates."
"Then you're handling it." He hangs up without saying goodbye, which is the closest thing to I love you that Declan Sullivan has ever offered anyone. I sit there holding the dead phone and feeling entirely like his daughter for one unguarded second.
By two in the afternoon I've pulled every archived template Sullivan Transport used between 2020 and 2022, laid three known drafts side by side with the forgery, and narrowed the source down to a file that never belonged to Sullivan Transport at all.
Political correspondence. The kind of letterhead template a graphic designer builds once and forgets, sitting on a server somewhere collecting digital dust until someone with patience and motive goes looking.
I sit back and stare at the screen.
A campaign office. Which means whoever did this didn't just study my company. They studied my history in Montana politics, dug back far enough to find a file most people would have forgotten existed, and waited.