Chapter 4
Ethan
Three hours in, and the ditch has yielded nothing.
The crash site looks worse in daylight. Jenna’s car is nose-down at an angle that makes my stomach clench, the front crumpled against the far bank, the driver’s door still hanging open from the night before.
The skid marks are short, which means she barely braked.
In daylight, the distance between where the tires left the road and where the car stopped is laughably small.
Three seconds. Maybe less. The difference between arriving and not.
I don’t say any of that.
I’m on my knees in the ditch grass, working in a grid pattern, hands black to the wrists with mud, while Jenna is ten feet away doing the same.
She’s been directing the search since we got here, reconstructing her steps, figuring the angle of impact, calculating where her bag would have landed versus where her body ended up.
Data analyst brain. Even in a panic, she’s precise.
She told me to start at the driver’s side and work outward.
I did. She hasn’t suggested we take a break.
She hasn’t thanked me or apologized for the inconvenience.
She told me where to look, and I looked there.
We’ve been doing this for three hours in silence, only breaking when she asks me to check another section.
My knees ache, and a blister is forming on my right thumb, but none of this registers as a reason to stop. She risked her job for this. Her health insurance. Every mile of the drive that put her car in this ditch.
Although I don’t yet know the full extent of what she’s lost, I recognize the grief in her eyes. That makes this flash drive the most important thing in the world to me because this beautiful woman needs me to be useful, and being useful is something I know how to do.
“It should be here.” Her voice has an edge now as she stands in the spot where I found her last night, turning in a tight circle, hands pushing through the grass as if she can will the thing into existence.
“It’s yellow and black. Striped. It would stand out against”—she waves at the green and brown around us—“anything.”
She’s right. A bee-striped flash drive in this ditch should be visible from twenty feet. We’ve checked every pocket, every fold of her jacket, the inside of the car, and the shoulder of the road. I went through her bag twice. She went through it three times. The drive is not here.
Jenna paces, her hands clenched at her sides.
The skin at her wrists, where her sleeves have ridden up, is angry and red.
She doesn’t pull them down. She doesn’t even notice because she’s spiraling.
Her pace tightens and her circles become smaller and her breathing grows faster.
She risked everything for that evidence, and now it’s gone.
My urge to fix this is so strong that it feels physical, like pressure behind my ribs urging me to do something, say something, make it better.
But the right words don’t exist. She lost evidence that could protect this ranch and expose a corporation, and no combination of words will change that.
So I stay in the ditch and keep searching.
I don’t fill the silence because it belongs to her, and she needs it more than she needs my comfort.
I’m not good at witnessing rather than solving. I’m built for action—fix the fence, pull the calf, reroute the camera feed. Standing still while someone hurts makes my clenched jaw ache. But she doesn’t need me to fix it; she needs me to take it as seriously as she does.
So I do.
Jenna stops pacing.
I watch her from my crouch in the grass. I’m always watching her, which is a problem I’ll deal with later. Something shifts in her expression. Not panic, but something slower. A thought assembling itself.
“The goat was licking my hand.”
I go still.
“When I was on the ground, the goat was licking my hand.” She says it like she’s reading evidence aloud, as if she’s back in a conference room presenting findings. “My hand was near my pocket. Where the flash drive was. Do you think the goat took it back to its... what’s it called? Nest? Lair?”
My face does something I can’t control. Somewhere between horror and a laugh I will take to my grave before I let it out. Because right now, she’s standing in a ditch holding the shattered pieces of her escape plan together, and I will not be the man who laughs.
But… yeah. Dorito ate the flash drive.
“Jenna.” I stand and brush my hands on my jeans.
I keep my voice at the exact pitch I use when I’m telling Daniel a heifer got through the south gate—calm, factual, this-is-a-situation-and-here-is-how-we-handle-it.
“The drive is durable. Plastic casing, metal connector. Designed to survive drops, water, impact.”
She stares at me.
“Dorito’s digestive system is...” I search for the word. “Thorough, but not destructive. He’s passed worse. We’ll need to wait twenty-four to seventy-two hours for him to process it.”
The silence that follows is the loudest thing I’ve ever heard.
“You’re telling me,” she says, her voice very controlled, which I'm learning is more dangerous than her panic, “that a goat ate the evidence that could bring down a corporation.”
“Yeah.”
“And we have to wait for the goat to—”
“Pass it through his digestive system.”
“Seventy-two hours.”
“Could be less. Dorito’s pretty efficient.”
She opens her mouth, closes it, then opens it again.
Her hands go to her hips as she processes the information that her evidence is inside a goat.
Her glasses have slid down her nose, and a leaf is caught in her hair.
I am not going to reach over and remove it because if I touch her right now, I won’t stop.
Her laugh starts as a startled breath, then cracks open, helpless and reluctant and halfway to crying.
She presses her hand over her mouth, but it doesn’t help. Her laughter escapes between her fingers. It’s raw and real, nothing like the careful, guarded woman who asked me about protocol in the kitchen earlier.
I would stand in this field until the sun burns out to listen to her laughter.
“Dorito’s eaten worse.”
“What could be worse than—”
“Fence posts, a leather glove, an entire bag of Daniel’s protein bars, wrappers included. Half a garden hose. Took him three days and a vet visit for him to pass that.”
Her laughter doubles. She bends at the waist, one hand braced on her knee. Hearing it in the open air rather than compressed through a phone or filtered through a speaker, full and dimensional and so very close, is the best thing I’ve heard since she whispered my name on the couch this morning.
This woman drove through the night, crashed her car, woke up in a stranger’s house, and discovered her evidence is inside a goat.
And now she’s standing in a ditch, laughing like the world just handed her something absurd and beautiful.
She’s not fragile. She’s not a damsel. She’s a woman who risked everything and is handling a goat-shaped setback with more composure than I have right now.
The pasture stretches around us as we walk back, open and rolling.
Land that makes you feel small in a way that’s a relief.
The morning sun has burned off the spring chill, and the grass is still damp underfoot, soaking through the seams of my boots.
Somewhere behind us, Dorito trots along with the smug, clip-clop rhythm of an animal completely indifferent to the federal evidence he’s digesting.
As we walk, my mind is already running the other thread. The one I haven’t said out loud because she’s laughing, and I won’t be the one to stop it.
Jenna stole data from a corporation targeting our land. She drove through the night. Crashed a mile from the ranch. If LandCorp is what she says it is, they’ll notice she’s gone. They’ll notice what she took. And eventually, they’ll figure out where she went.
The ranch has cameras on every access road.
I built the security grid myself—motion sensors, encrypted feeds, night vision on the east ridge.
It was built for wildlife and trespassers, not corporate threat response, but it’ll hold.
I’ll need to loop in Beckett’s veteran watch network.
Extend the perimeter alerts. Check the camera angles on the county road where she crashed.
I catalog the tasks the way I always do: priority, sequence, resources. It steadies me. It’s the version of control I trust. Not the kind that grips tighter, but the kind that builds a wall so the people inside can stop running.
She doesn’t need to know any of that yet. Right now, she needs to walk beside me and breathe and let the land do what Montana does to people who've been clenched too long.
The rest I’ll handle after dark.
“So we just wait?” Jenna asks as she walks beside me, close enough that I’m aware of the exact distance between her hand and mine. Two inches. Maybe less.
“We wait.” I keep my eyes on the fence line ahead, focusing on fence maintenance and not thinking about the two inches of charged air between our fingers. “I’ll monitor him. Shouldn’t be hard. Dorito doesn’t stray far from the house.”
“Because he’s hoping for more things to eat?”
“He ate the welcome mat last spring. We stopped replacing it.”
She makes a sound that’s not quite a laugh but something softer, and the wind carries it across the pasture.
It lands somewhere inside me that I can’t name.
My pulse hammers. My hands are at my sides, and my breathing is regular, but absolutely nothing about my interior matches my exterior right now.
I’m figuring out how to make her laugh again, wondering how long to wait before I touch her on purpose, and whether she knows what she’s doing to me.
She doesn’t. That makes it worse.
Her hand swings closer with the next step, the back of her fingers brushing mine.
Neither of us pulls away.
It’s nothing. Skin against skin for half a second, the most casual contact two people walking side by side can have.
Except that my stride has shortened to match hers without my deciding to, and her hand is still right there, warm and close, rewiring my nerve endings.
I’ve held injured animals, pulled calves, and comforted a barn kitten no bigger than my palm, but nothing I’ve ever touched was as sweet as Jenna Calloway’s skin.
“The land is beautiful.” Her voice is quiet, a woman looking at open space as someone does when they’ve never had any. “I’ve never been anywhere like this.”
“It grows on you.”
What I don’t say is, “Stay.”
What I don’t say is, “Every inch of this property has been Sutton land for three generations, and I have never once looked at a fence line and thought mine the way I do with you.”
Those thoughts are so far outside the caretaker script that I don’t have a protocol for them. She’d appreciate that—me reaching for structure because the feeling is too big.
Her hand brushes mine again as we continue to walk, this time deliberately, or close to it. The almost-kiss from the kitchen hangs between us, as tangible as the charged air.
Dorito bleats behind us, totally smug.
At the fence line, Jenna stops to look back at the pasture.
The wind catches her hair and pushes it across her forehead.
The neat corporate bob isn’t so neat anymore.
She tucks it behind her ear and pushes her glasses up.
For one second, standing at the edge of my family’s land with the morning sun behind her and a goat at her heels, she looks as if she belongs here.
Dorito trots after her as she turns back toward the house, as if he belongs to her. I follow them both, unable to go in any other direction.
I waited six months to meet this woman. Six months of phone calls, emails, and the slow process of learning someone’s laugh, breathing, and way of thinking. I waited because she asked me to, and waiting for Jenna Calloway is something I would do forever without needing a reason.
I can wait three days for a goat.