All the monitors come alive.
Todd's still in his room at the Hampton. He'll come down to the bar at sundown.
He'll order whiskey and I already know he'll drink it.
In about four days, the email I sent this morning is going to land on a compliance officer's desk in Houston, and the world Todd built for himself in Garrison is going to start coming apart from the inside while he's still drinking at a Hampton bar two hours away.
He won't see it coming.
Hartley's phone is south of Llano. Stationary now, parked off a county road.
He'll move again in an hour. Tomorrow he'll move even closer. The day after, closer again.
I sit at the desk with both screens live and the want for Hadley still quiet and heavy in my chest, and I do the math.
Phantom is on the road by sunup. Five days before he's back.
Todd will start coming apart at Bell inside that window.
Hartley will move on his timeline inside that window too.
Whatever the firm decided in that forty-seven-minute call, it's going to happen on my watch, not Phantom's.
My job for the next five days is to keep her safe, keep Nash safe, keep the ranch standing.
That's the deal.
That's the only deal that matters.
CHAPTER TEN
Hadley
I'm on the bunkhouse porch with a dishtowel over my shoulder when Diesel runs into the water trough.
He doesn't do it on purpose.
He's running circles around the round pen with Nash chasing him, both of them moving the way kids and dogs move when nobody's making them be careful, and Diesel takes a hard left that he doesn't quite stick.
He hits the trough shoulder-first.
Goes shoulder-deep into the water.
His tail is the last thing to disappear.
Nash, two seconds behind him, doesn't hesitate for a single second.
He launches himself in.
Cannonball, fully clothed, a whoop of pure joy on the way down.
The water goes up in a sheet that sparkles in the sun, and I press my hand against my mouth and laugh—real laughing, the kind that comes out of my chest before my brain catches up.
Diesel barks once. Surfaces and then realizes Nash is in there with him.
Then he starts paddling in a slow circle like this was the plan all along.
I drop the dishtowel on the porch rail and walk across the gravel.