Chapter 13
Ethan
I don’t move.
Jenna’s breath is warm against my throat, her arm still wrapped around me, trusting in a way that lands heavier now.
The phone glows in my hand.
I know where you are, Jenna. We should talk about what you took.
Unknown number. No name. But there’s only one person who’d know about her actions and care enough to track her here.
The chill seeps into my fingers first, as it always does. The body’s instinctive response to a live threat. Identify. Assess. Neutralize. The ordnance specialist doesn’t detonate; he plans.
Carefully, I slide out from under her, replacing myself with a pillow the way I’ve learned she needs—something solid against her chest or she wakes reaching. She shifts, murmurs, settles. Her hand curls around the pillow, the wire ring nestled beside the gold band catching the low light.
My wife. Those two words rearrange every threat matrix I’ve ever built. Every scenario now includes her.
I press my mouth to her hair. Brief. Firm. A promise she doesn’t hear.
Then I take the phone and step into the hallway.
Daniel picks up on the first ring.
“Someone texted Jenna’s phone. Direct. They know she’s here, and they know about the files.”
Silence. Then: “Vance.”
“That’s where my money is.”
“Beckett?”
“Next call.”
“Make it.” The line goes dead.
Beckett answers on the second ring. I can hear the wind, and I know he’s already outside, running the east perimeter like he does every morning.
“We’ve got direct contact,” I tell him. “Text to Jenna’s personal phone, unknown number.”
“Read it to me.”
I do, pacing slowly down the hallway as I repeat the message.
“Burner,” he says after a beat. “Probably already ditched, but I’ll run it anyway.” A pause, then, more serious, “He’s escalating. Reaching out to her directly means he’s working on a timeline.”
“We’re on a faster one.”
“Copy that.”
The line goes dead.
I stay where I am for a moment, the phone still in my hand, the quiet of the house pressing in around me.
The fear feels different now. Before, it was controlled and professional, something I could assess and contain.
Now it’s tangled up with her. It tastes like her skin, like the quiet weight of this morning, like the sounds she makes when she dreams.
I know how to compartmentalize a threat.
I don’t know how to compartmentalize my wife.
I head downstairs and start the coffee, moving through the motions without thinking. Two mugs—hers first, the blue one with the chipped handle, then mine. It’s muscle memory now, no different from the detonator sequences I learned years ago.
Jenna appears in the doorway a few minutes later, swallowed up in my flannel. She doesn’t say anything at first—just watches me, her gaze sharp and assessing, like she’s already working through the variables and knows something doesn’t add up.
“Tell me.”
No preamble. She cuts straight to the point.
I hand her the phone. She reads the message, and I catch the flicker in her expression—the tightening at the corners of her mouth, the brief pause in her breathing—but she holds steady.
“Vance,” she says, certain. “We knew this was coming.”
“Daniel and Beckett are already moving on it. Beckett’s tracing the number.” I pass her the blue mug. “We’re still ahead of him.”
She takes the coffee with a steady hand and moves into the kitchen, setting the phone down beside her mug. Her jaw sets as something hard and focused locks into place.
“I want to testify,” she says. “I want to burn it down.”
There’s no heat in the words—just intent.
“But first, we need that drive.”
Her voice carries the weight of a woman who spent two years in a cubicle analyzing data for a corporation poisoning the land of the man she loves, and she is done looking away.
I study her. Her bitten nails are growing back, still coated in Kitty’s pale pink varnish. Resting her forearms on the counter, she appears calm and composed, patches visible.
She’s no longer the woman I found unconscious in a ditch with a goat standing over her. She’s the woman who got back up, the one who said yes on a porch and meant it with her whole heart.
Now she’s standing in my kitchen, ready to face the man who sent that message and take him apart with the truth.
My respect for her deepens into something I can't yet define; I no longer see her as someone I need to protect, but as someone I need to stand beside.
The shift is seismic for a man who has spent his whole life stepping in front of others.
“Okay.” I set my mug down. “Then we do this right. Together. But first, we need the drive.”
A look passes between us over the rim of her coffee—it’s heat and tenderness and something steadier. Commitment.
Two people choosing, without saying it out loud, to walk straight into the fire, side by side.
Two hours later, Dorito delivers. He does it in the middle of the eight-foot enclosure with a single gate and a trail camera on the post. Daniel and I welded it together the morning after we confirmed he’d swallowed it because you don’t trust a federal case to a goat and an open pasture.
The flash drive lies in the grass, its yellow-and-black striped casing slick and filthy but intact. The plastic exterior held up. USB drives are designed to withstand drops and water, not ruminant stomachs, but Dorito’s system was no match for industrial-grade polycarbonate.
I stare at it for a second longer than necessary. Several days of checking the barn and pen at two-hour intervals. Maggie narrated digestive timelines like a sportscaster.
I carry the knowledge that a federal case against a billion-dollar company is inside a goat named after a corn chip. My shoulders drop an inch. Not celebration. Release.
Crouching down, I pull on a work glove and pick it up.
Dorito stands three feet away, chewing, watching me with the self-satisfied expression of an animal that has done exactly what was asked of him and expects a reward.
“Good boy,” I say, because what else do you say to a goat that just shit out a flash drive?
Behind me, I hear a small, strangled half-gasp. I turn to see Jenna standing at the enclosure gate, cradling her coffee, staring at the drive.
“Is that—”
“Yeah.”
“From—”
“Yeah.”
Suddenly, she bursts into laughter, helpless and uncontrollable, her hand over her mouth, coffee sloshing.
Her glasses slide down her nose as she bends at the waist, her joy filling the morning air, full, bright, and completely undignified.
It’s worth every hour I’ve spent on goat surveillance.
I would sift through a thousand handfuls of goat shit just to hear her laugh like that.
“I stole corporate evidence from a billion-dollar company,” she manages, straightening up, wiping her eyes, and trying to regain her composure. “And a goat—”
“Efficient goat.”
“—decided it was a snack.”
“You know he’s not picky. He ate Dad’s truck registration last month. Dad had to explain to the DMV that his paperwork was consumed by livestock. They didn’t believe him until he brought photographic evidence.”
“You photographed it?”
“I photograph everything Dorito eats. I have a folder on my phone called ‘Insurance Claims: Goat.’ It’s extensive.”
She loses it again, bent double, one hand braced on her knee.
When she finally straightens, her eyes are wet in a way that isn’t only laughter. The weight she’s been carrying, the evidence she couldn’t reach, the case she couldn’t make, the man in the expensive boots asking at the diner, all had a goat-sized caveat attached. Now it doesn’t.
She pushes her glasses up with her index finger and breathes for a second. “What else is in the folder?”
“You already know about the garden hose and the welcome mat. But there was also the Bible someone left on the porch. He ate Genesis through Exodus before Maggie caught him. She said it was blasphemy.”
I pause, shaking my head at Dorito. “Four days. You ate most of the Old Testament before lunch and cleared it by dinner. Four days on a USB drive isn’t digestion; it’s dramatic pacing.
You held this one,” I accuse, pointing a finger at him.
“Like you knew you were the main act and were waiting for your cue.”
Jenna laughs at me scolding the goat, the morning sun catching the tears of laughter on her lashes. I’m holding a device that's been through a goat’s digestive system, but all I can see is the way she laughs with her whole body.
I clean the drive at the outdoor sink, using dish soap, warm water, and a toothbrush for the connector.
Jenna watches, arms folded, grinning. “You’re sanitizing evidence.”
“I’m sanitizing a USB drive.” As I dry the connector with compressed air and tilt it under the light, I see the contacts are clean. “Should read fine. These casings are sealed.”
She beams. “Goat-proof.”
Jenna follows me into my study, where warm electronics sit alongside cold coffee that Crowley knocked over an hour ago. Screens, recovery tools, and the encrypted VPN Beckett configured surround us. Crowley is asleep on the router, and Pixel is on my chair.
Pixel gives me a look of profound betrayal as I move her to the desk before curling up next to the monitor.
I plug the drive in. The light blinks once, yellow, then green. Readable sectors. Data. I exhale in relief. We have something to work with.
She’s beside me before I even turn around. “Show me the directory tree.” Her voice is precise and focused as she slips into data analyst mode, scanning the screen. “Start with the root. I need to see the file structure before we open anything.”
I pull up the directory. She reads it the way I would a circuit board, seeing the entire pattern at once.
“There.” Her finger hovers close to the screen. “That sub-folder. LCE_WR. That’s for water rights. And below it, MIN_SRV. Mineral surveys. I’ve seen those prefixes in the filing system.”
I smile at her enthusiasm. “Coffee?”
She doesn’t look up. “Please.”