Chapter 2
DAISY
The cabin hasn’t changed. It’s small and clean, smelling faintly of wood and old books.
It contains precisely one bedroom with a brass bed frame that’s probably an antique, one bathroom with fixtures that predate my birth, and a kitchenette that’s never seen anything more complicated than reheated coffee.
The walls are log, chinked with white plaster, and the floors are wide pine planks that creak under my feet as I step inside.
The quilt on the bed is new, all interlocking rings in shades of blue and cream. I run my hand over it. Someone put a lot of hours into this for a guest cabin that’s most likely been closed up since Dad died. My money’s on that someone being the youngest Hartley, June.
June.
Three years since the funeral, and she still sends birthday cards and emails with life updates, including photos from her fledgling event-planning business, June & Co.
I haven’t written back to a single one. And she made me this quilt anyway.
I drop my bags inside the door and stand there, breathing.
The air tastes like wood smoke and pine, with an underlying hint of the mustiness of a cabin that’s been closed up too long.
Dust particles drift through the sunlight slanting through the windows, and outside, I can hear birds calling to each other.
I’m here. I’m actually here.
I let that sit for a beat before my need for caffeine wins out over the moment. I find instant coffee in the kitchenette and boil the kettle. Black, no sugar. Dad always said cream was for people who didn’t really like coffee.
My phone vibrates again, but this time I look.
FELIX
Hey babe. Just got out of my meeting. How’s the drive? You make it to Bumfuck, Montana yet?
I stare at the message for a minute.
Felix Woods used to be my boyfriend of nine months, until two weeks ago, when I broke things off after realizing how vastly different our priorities are.
I told him we could still be friends. He smiled patiently and told me he had no doubt I’d “come around.” Then he casually mentioned that his father would be golfing with my editor on Saturday, same as every Saturday for the past twenty years.
He reached across the table to rest his hand on mine as he said he’d make sure his dad kept talking me up like he has for the last nine months before calmly returning to his risotto.
He’s the marketing director at a tech startup in Denver, owner of a sleek loft, curated capsule wardrobe, and firm opinions about the “optics” of everything I do.
After years of freelance checks and apartments with questionable plumbing, being with Felix had felt like arriving somewhere I was supposed to be.
The problem is I never quite felt at home once I got there.
Now, it’s been two weeks and he’s still calling me babe. But going scorched earth on Felix is a luxury I can’t afford until I’ve got the staff contract, so babe is a tax I’ll have to keep paying for a while longer.
I quickly type a reply.
ME
Made it safe. Thanks. And Felix, don’t call me babe. Friends, remember?
He responds immediately.
FELIX
K. Don’t get trampled by a cow or whatever. Love you.
Love you.
He says it like a man who still hasn’t heard me and isn’t planning on starting.
Ah, good old selective hearing.
I heave an internal sigh, then I click the message I ignored in the car.
MOM
Called that lawyer you asked me to. Nothing we can do about the land sale. Sorry, baby. Maybe it’s time to let it go?
I close my eyes and let the phone drop to the bed.
Larkspur River ranch. Three hundred acres my great-grandfather homesteaded when this valley was nothing but wilderness.
My father left it behind when he followed my mother to Colorado, back when love felt worth uprooting your whole life for.
When she left him, he came back to Montana, back to Bill Hartley and the only work he’d ever really known, and he held on to those three hundred acres like a promise he intended to keep.
It needed more money than a foreman’s salary could stretch to cover, but that was fine.
It was our someday project, father and daughter, building something together.
But someday never came.
The debts surfaced right after he died, when I was twenty-three years old and too broken to ask the right questions.
My mother flew in from Arizona, hired a lawyer I’d never met and they sat me down at that kitchen table with neat stacks of papers stamped with urgent red notices.
Property taxes, equipment loans, and a mountain of outstanding bills I’d never heard of.
“Your father was stretched thin.” The lawyer’s voice was sympathetic. “He kept this from you to protect you.”
My mother nodded along, her face carefully neutral even as her eyes shifted to her wristwatch, counting the minutes until she could escape back to Arizona. “We need to deal with this now, Daisy. Before it gets worse.”
I was so tired. So broken. I signed where they told me to sign.
I didn’t read the fine print. I didn’t get a second opinion. I didn’t question why the auction happened so fast. Or why there was only one serious bidder.
Or why the lawyer’s phone number went to a disconnected line three months later.
I trusted them. And they sold my father’s legacy for scraps.
The Blackwoods bought it. Every damn acre. For less than half what it was worth.
Silas Blackwood stood in the front row at that auction, silver-haired and expensive-booted, head of the family that’s been buying up this valley for the better part of thirty years.
He bought my birthright for the price of a mediocre house in Denver.
He didn’t even have the decency to look smug about it, just nodded once, like the outcome was never in question.
Because it wasn’t. I understand that now. The whole thing was orchestrated, the debts and the rushed timeline and the lawyer who vanished. They played me like I was a child.
And my mother? She didn’t orchestrate it, but she didn’t fight it either. She had a life in Colorado and no particular attachment to a piece of land she’d never wanted him to keep in the first place.
I avoided driving past the ranch on my way here, taking the long route, and adding forty-five minutes to my trip just so I wouldn’t have to see it. Someone else’s cattle on my father’s land. I can’t look at that yet.
I passed the cemetery turnoff too. Kept my eyes on the road and my foot on the gas. He’ll still be there when I’m ready.
For a moment I just sit there, hands in my lap, eyes fixed on a knot in the pine floor, and breathe through it.
But that’s not why I’m here. Not entirely.
I pull my laptop from my bag and place it on the small desk by the window.
My view consists of the main house, the barn, and a slice of the paddock where Wyatt is still working.
He’s put on a shirt now. I can see the blue of it even from this distance, but I can still picture him without it.
The sweat gleaming on his skin, the confident ease with which he handled that horse.
Stop it. Stop it right now.
What a spectacular failure of character, less than an hour after arriving.
I open my files, the ones I’ve been building ever since I found the discrepancy in my father’s records. I was sorting through the last box of his paperwork, the stuff the lawyer said wasn’t important, just personal files and old receipts, nothing relevant to the estate.
But I’m a journalist. I notice things. I ask questions. And when I saw that bank statement, I couldn’t unsee it.
A fifty-thousand-dollar cashier’s check, dated one week before he died. No payee listed on his statement, just the withdrawal and the check number. And there beside it, clear as day in my father’s handwriting:
Buying back proof.
My father, who never spent a dollar he couldn’t justify.
Who drove the same truck for fifteen years because “it still runs fine, angel, no sense bein’ wasteful.
” Who budgeted Christmas gifts in October and kept a leather notebook of every major purchase he ever made, dated and annotated in his careful handwriting.
That man withdrew fifty thousand dollars a week before he died, and I have no idea who he gave it to or what he got in return.
Dad drove that switchback every day for years. He knew every curve and every soft shoulder. Every patch that iced over in the spring. And Bill Hartley didn’t ride with anyone who drove recklessly.
Two cautious men on a road they knew by heart don’t just go off a cliff on a routine run to the north pasture.
It doesn’t make sense. None of it makes sense. And I’ve learned over my years of chasing stories that when something doesn’t make sense, it’s because someone is hiding the truth.
I’ve spent six months trying to prove it from Denver. Six months of phone calls and public records requests and the kind of dogged, unglamorous research that wouldn’t make for good television but occasionally makes for good journalism.
The bank released the cashier’s check details after I spent three weeks and a ton of paperwork proving I was Tom Monroe’s next of kin, only to discover the check was made out to cash.
My father was paying someone he wanted to protect. Someone who’d agreed to give him proof on the condition that their name never touched a bank record.
The sheriff’s office returned my first two calls with polite non-answers and stopped returning them entirely after the third. The lawyer my mother hired straight up vanished off the face of the earth.
County records show the Larkspur River sale was handled by a firm called Whitmore and Associates out of Helena, which conveniently closed its doors three months after the auction and left no forwarding address.
I pulled Whitmore’s formation paperwork out of the Montana state database.
Helena registered, P.O. box, single signatory on the articles of incorporation. No website. No physical office.
A firm that existed on paper just long enough to handle one auction and then evaporated.