12. Chapter 12
Cade
Noah hands me the post-hole digger like it's any other Tuesday. Then tells me Kristen Vance is trying to kill every contractor job in the department, not just Quinn's, and it takes me a full three seconds to catch up to what he just said.
"Say that again."
"Quinn told me last night, after you'd gone in." Noah drives a post into the ground like it owes him money. "Kristen submitted some proposal to leadership. Wants to eliminate independent contractor positions altogether. Fold everything under full-time staff. She's using your case as the example."
"Using it how?"
"Structural ambiguity, apparently." He says the words like they taste bad.
"Translation: a Red Sox catcher living under my roof while his physical therapist treats him is exactly the kind of thing that makes a department look sloppy on paper.
Paige said the same thing when Quinn told her.
Kristen can't find anything wrong with the work itself, so she's going after the model instead. "
I set the digger down because my hands need something to do that isn't shaking.
"This is bigger than the inquiry."
"This is her trying to torch the whole model so the inquiry stops mattering.
" Noah straightens and wipes his forehead with his forearm.
"Quinn's spent five years rebuilding everything one pitcher broke.
Now somebody wants to use you to break it again, except this time it takes the whole department down with her. "
I think about this morning. She handed me my schedule in that same clinical voice, pulling her hand back before I could hold onto it. She already knew. She didn't say a word. That's what she does with anything that scares her: she protects everyone else from it first.
"Why didn't she tell me?"
"Would you have let her go into that call alone if she had?"
I don't have an answer for that, which is its own answer.
Noah watches me for a second longer than the question needs.
He's not just relaying gossip. He's deciding something: whether I'm steady enough to be trusted with this.
He's been testing that since the day I showed up on his ranch road.
I get the sense I just passed, though I couldn't tell you the exact criteria.
"She doesn't know I told you," he says. "Keep it that way for now. She's got enough to carry without managing how you take it."
I want to argue. I don't.
We work the rest of the line without talking much. Two posts, three, the rhythm of it settling into something almost meditative. Dig the hole. Check the depth. Set the post. Pack the dirt. A body that listens, ground that gives exactly as much as you ask it to.
There's no rep scheme for a leadership call. I can run every test clean, heal faster than anyone projected, and none of it touches the actual fight. The fight isn't about my body at all — it's about how the whole arrangement looks on paper to people who've never met either of us.
I hate how useless that makes me.
By the time we break for water, I've circled the one thing I have control over: the truth.
Kristen needs perception. She needs this to look compromised.
Personal. Sloppy enough to justify burning down a whole job category.
The only way Quinn beats that with documentation alone is if nobody on that call has a reason to believe there's a truth underneath the paperwork.
There's a truth underneath the paperwork.
Which makes me the variable in all of this. Not my elbow. Me.
If her case isn't enough on its own, and Kristen finds an angle anyway, I'm not going to sit somewhere safe while a room full of strangers assumes the worst about something I could clear up by simply telling them the truth.
At dinner, Quinn asks Noah normal questions about the fence line and doesn't look at me any longer than a session would require. She's good at this. Five years of practice good.
I almost say her name. I get as far as the first syllable in my head before I stop myself, because Noah's right. If I tell her I know, she'll spend whatever's left of her energy managing my reaction instead of finishing her case, and she doesn't have energy to spare on me tonight.
So I pass the bread. I ask Paige something about the dogs that I don't really care about. I let Quinn believe, for one more evening, that I don't know what she's carrying.
But I know.
Later, she doesn't come out to play guitar.
The light in her window stays on long after everyone else's goes dark, and I sit on the porch with my own guitar across my knees, not playing, just watching that square of yellow light like it's the only honest conversation happening on this ranch tonight.
By the time it finally goes out, I've made up my mind. If perception is the only weapon Kristen has, I'm done being the reason Quinn has to hide what's true.
Whatever Friday brings, she's not fighting it alone in the dark. Not anymore.