Chapter 12
TWELVE
DAWSON
Ashley Rourke Pruitt looks at my bare chest a second longer than a married woman has any business looking, and I decide right there that whatever she wants, she’s not getting it easy.
I didn’t grab a shirt. That’s on me. I heard the knock, saw blond hair through the window glass, and figured a Friday morning visitor could survive a man in sweatpants.
I didn’t account for her eyes dragging from my shoulder to my stomach and stop somewhere south of my navel like she’s pricing a used truck.
“Morning,” she says, bright, like she hasn’t just done that. “I hope I’m not interrupting anything.”
“You are.” I don’t move to let her in. “It’s seven in the morning.”
“County business doesn’t keep ranch hours.
” Her gaze slides past me to Sage, barefoot in my shirt, glasses pushed up her nose, hair a mess I put there myself an hour ago, and something in Ashley’s face does a small, careful thing.
Not jealousy. Not quite. Something colder and more controlled than that, shuttered as fast as it opened. “Sage. You look well.”
“I am well.” Sage doesn’t move an inch closer to the door, doesn’t fold her arms over the shirt, doesn’t do a single thing to make this easier for anybody but herself. “What’s in the envelope, Ashley?”
Straight for it. That’s my wife. No small talk, no coffee offer, just a woman standing in her husband’s shirt refusing to pretend this is normal.
“The county’s copy of your marriage filing. I thought you’d want it for your records, given everything.” Ashley holds it out, manicured and patient, like she drove twenty minutes past our last locked gate for the pleasure of handing us a photocopy. “I could have mailed it, but I was in the area.”
Rimrock is thirty-two hundred people and a diner with a chalkboard. Nobody is ever just in the area of the boundary house at seven in the morning.
I take the envelope so Sage doesn’t have to reach past me for it, and Ashley’s eyes track the movement of my arm the whole way, the same slow inventory as before. My skin goes tight under it in a way that has nothing to do with the cold morning air.
“Thank you,” I say, even enough that it isn’t actually thanks. “We’ve got it from here.”
“Of course.” She doesn’t leave. She glances at Sage’s glasses, at the hem of my shirt riding her thigh, and that bright smile recalibrates, fast and professional, like a truck route rerouting around a closed gate. “You two look happy. I’m glad. Truly.”
The word truly sits wrong, a bad note in a room full of good ones. I’ve known this woman my whole life, since grade school, since long before either of us understood what our families’ names would take from us, and I already know what her truly usually ends up meaning for somebody.
“We’re managing,” Sage says, and I watch her weigh every second of this exchange like she weighed the tack room, like she weighed Cruz’s silence in the truck.
She’s not saying anything yet. She’s just holding it, quiet, patient, like everything she plans to bring back out later at exactly the moment it does the most damage.
Ashley finally steps back off the porch, heels finding gravel with the ease of a woman who’s never once had to watch her footing in her life. “Enjoy your morning,” she says, and there’s nothing in the words that should bother me and everything about how she says them that does.
She’s halfway to her car before Sage shuts the door.
“You want to tell me what that was?” Sage asks.
“That was Ashley being Ashley.”
“That was Ashley looking at you like she was pricing you.” Sage crosses her arms now, glasses catching the morning light, and there’s no jealousy in her voice, just the same forensic tone she used dismantling a diner full of gossips.
“And you looked like you wanted to put a shirt on and a continent between you.”
She’s not wrong. I’m not telling her that.
“I don’t like people showing up unannounced.” True. Not the whole truth. I’ve gotten very good, over the years, at handing people true things that aren’t the whole thing, and I hate how easily it comes out of me now, aimed at her.
Sage studies me a second longer, the same look she gave the fence splice yesterday, patient, calculations running behind her eyes. Then she lets it go, same as Cruz’s non-answer in the truck, keeping instead of forcing.
“I have a call in an hour,” she says instead. “Go put on a shirt before you traumatize any more visitors from the clerk’s office.”
I go put on a shirt. Then I take it back off, lace up, and go for a run instead, because the alternative is standing in my own kitchen thinking about how Ashley looked at me, and I would rather run a mountain trail on no breakfast than do that.
I take the creek trail into the drainage at a pace that leaves no room for anything but footing and breath, and by the time I loop back my skin’s slick with sweat and my head’s finally clear.
Fifty-eight minutes, eight miles, twenty-five hundred feet of vertical according to the Garmin.
None of it outruns what’s riding along with me.
It just quiets down enough to be useful.
I shower fast, dress faster. Dark jeans, a belt, a light button-down in pale grey cotton I roll to the forearms without thinking about it, muscle memory older than the tattoos underneath.
I trade my Garmin for my Patek last, out of habit more than vanity, plain steel on a worn leather band, no diamonds, nothing that shouts.
My father gave it to me the day I made partner in everything but name.
Understated was the whole point. Loud men get robbed. Quiet men get trusted.
The call comes at nine.
Eli, breathless, no greeting. “Records office. It’s on fire.”
I’m in the truck before he finishes the sentence, and Sage is already grabbing her boots off the mat by the time I hit the front door, because she heard my voice change and didn’t need the rest of the sentence explained to her.
“You’re not coming,” I say.
“I’m already in the truck.” She’s already in the truck. “Drive.”
I drive.
Rimrock’s volunteer department gets there before we do, four trucks and half the men who used to play football with me and Eli, hoses already snaking across Main Street, smoke rolling black and thick off the roofline of the county records building like the whole structure is exhaling something it’s been holding for decades.
The crowd’s already three deep on the sidewalk, phones up, faces lit orange.
Eli’s running the barricade line, waving trucks through gaps that didn’t exist thirty seconds ago, shouting names I don’t catch over the roar of the fire eating through a hundred years of paperwork.
“Basement archive,” Eli says when I reach him, soot already streaking one side of his face. “That’s where it started. West is trying to get the old photo collection out of the second floor before the smoke does. I told him he’s an idiot.”
“Is he wrong to try?”
“Completely. Doesn’t mean he’s stopping.”
A firefighter comes out crouched and fast with a man slung over one shoulder, boots scrabbling for purchase on the wet pavement, and the crowd surges forward before the second truck’s crew pushes them back.
Somebody’s screaming a name. Somebody else is already on their knees with a phone to their ear giving an address they don’t need to give, because half this valley already knows exactly where the records office is.
I feel Sage beside me before I see her, close enough that her shoulder finds mine without either of us deciding it, and I get one hand flat against her back and press her half a step behind me, out of the path of the next crew coming through with a hose line.
“I can see fine from back here,” she says, already reading the move for what it is.
“I know.”
“You don’t have to manage me.”
“I’m not managing you. I’m keeping a burning building off my wife.” I don’t take my hand off her back. She doesn’t ask me to. “There’s a difference.”
“That’s my line.”
“I learned from the best.”
One corner of her mouth lifts under all that smoke and noise, almost, and it’s the only steady thing in the whole street for about two seconds.
By the time the last hose line goes from a roar to a hiss, the fire chief’s crew has the roof smoldering instead of burning and our town does the thing Rimrock always does the second the worst of a crisis passes: it feeds people.
Nell’s out there in her apron with a folding table and a coffee urn like she keeps one loaded in the trunk for exactly this.
Tessa’s directing two teenagers unloading pizza boxes from the back of a hatchback, feeding soot-streaked firefighters before they’ve even peeled their gear off.
Then I see Ashley.
She’s standing at the edge of the crowd in a blazer already ruined by soot, watching her own building burn, and her face has gone bloodless in a way I’ve only seen once before, a long time ago, right before I walked away from her and never asked what it did to her.
I leave Sage with Tessa before Sage can argue about it, and I cross the street.
“Ashley.”
She turns, and for one second, before the county-official mask slides back into place, I catch something underneath it.
Fear. Real fear, not performed for an audience, and it isn’t aimed at me or at the building.
Her eyes go past my shoulder first, out to the street, to the cars, to nothing I can see, and only then do they come back to my face.
Whatever she’s afraid of this morning isn’t standing in front of her.
“Terrible morning,” she says, already reaching for bright and civic and composed. “I don’t know how this happened. The wiring in that basement’s been a liability for years, I’ve said so at every commission meeting.”
“Basement archive,” I say. “Land and survey records. That’s a targeted fire, Ashley, not bad wiring.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I know what I know.” I keep my voice where I kept it with Curtis two nights before my own wedding, level, even, the kind of calm that takes more out of a man than shouting would. “When’s the last time you were in that basement?”
Her chin comes up. “I don’t keep a log of every time I visit my own building, Dawson.”
That’s a lie. I watch it leave her mouth and I know it’s a lie because I’ve read people my whole adult life, a skill my father drilled into me before I ever needed it, and one I never lost with this woman, even after all this time of not letting myself use it.
“Who else has access to that archive?”
“Staff. Contractors. Half the commission’s had a key at one point or another.” Her eyes cut past me, toward Sage, toward the crowd, toward anywhere that isn’t my face. “I really don’t see what you’re implying.”
“I’m not implying anything yet.” I let that word sit exactly as long as it needs to. “I’m asking questions.”
“You sound like you’re interrogating me.”
“I sound like a man who watched a federal informant get murdered with my own credentials this week and isn’t in the mood to be lied to twice in one morning.
” I keep my voice steady through the whole sentence, and I watch it land somewhere behind her eyes that the composed county-clerk mask can’t quite cover fast enough.
“One more. Did you know what was in that basement before this morning?”
“Everyone knows what’s in a records basement, Dawson. That’s what a records basement is for.”
Two lies. Maybe three. I’ve known this woman long enough to count them without trying, just like I did at twenty-four, right before I learned what she was capable of when it mattered most.
I don’t push a third question. I let her walk back toward the fire chief instead, blazer ruined, composure reassembling itself with every step, and I stand there in the street with smoke stinging my eyes and an old wound sitting where it’s always sat, undisturbed, unexplained, and very much still armed.
Sage is waiting when I get back to her, arms crossed, watching my face with patience and skepticism.
“You’re going to tell me what that was,” she says. She isn’t asking this time.
I could give her the same half-answer I gave her on the porch this morning, the unannounced visitors line. True and not the whole truth. Some old, well-worn habit reaching for the easy exit before I even decide to take it.
I don’t give it.
“Everything,” I say instead. “Every question I asked her and every answer she gave me, including the parts where I know she lied. You get to decide what we do with it. Not me deciding for you and telling you after. That’s the deal.”
Her eyes change, wary and unguarded at once, like she wasn’t expecting me to uphold the clause she wrote into our contract five days ago.
“Okay,” she says, quieter than the street around us has any right to allow. “Start talking.”
She’s close enough now that I catch the smoke still clinging to her hair under the soap from this morning, close enough that some reckless, off-duty part of me wants to close the last foot of space and forget there’s a burned building at my back.
I don’t. I want her mouth for reasons that have nothing to do with the fire, and every reason not to prove it in the middle of Main Street with half of Rimrock watching.
I don’t get the chance either way.
Mackenzie finds us at the edge of the barricade tape, soot streaked across one cheekbone, federal badge out and flashed at a deputy who clearly already knows who Holt Blackwater’s girlfriend is and doesn’t need convincing twice.
Voice pitched under the noise so that only the two of us catch it over the noise of the last hose line finally choking out.
“The files that burned.” She doesn’t waste time on a greeting. “Basement archive, land and survey records, the whole 1962 section gone before anyone got a hose on it.”
“Ashley knew more than she’s saying,” I tell her. “I’d bet the ranch on it.”
“Maybe.” Mackenzie’s eyes cut to Sage, then back to me, and whatever she’s about to say, I can already feel uneasiness before she says it. “I pulled the building’s access logs on the drive over. Somebody requested the full basement inventory nine days ago. Name, badge number, timestamp, all of it.”
“Who?”
She doesn’t make me wait for it, which is somehow worse than if she had.
“Cruz.”