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.”