Page 3 of July’s Cowboy Dallas

He left the way he'd come, and the heat pressed back in to fill the space.

Sadie was quiet for a moment. Then she pulled the folder back open and held the certification page and the brand registration side by side, and I watched her figure out what I already had.

“The brand doesn't match,” I said.

“No.” Her voice had gone flat. “It doesn't.”

“The registered owner on the paperwork isn't a Hollister operation.”

“I know.” She looked at the steer, then back at the pages. “I know what operation that brand belongs to. And I know who loads Hollister stock.” She closed the folder slowly, and when she looked at me her jaw was set but her eyes held something raw that she'd kill me for noticing. “This animal came off our trailer, Dallas.”

“Yes.”

“And these papers say he came from somewhere else.”

“Yes.”

She didn't say anything to that. She didn't need to. We both knew what forged livestock papers meant… what they opened the door to… what they implied about who'd known and for how long. She was already running the math. I could see it in the way she held herself, the slight squaring of her shoulders, the look of someone calculating the shape of a problem that keeps getting larger the more she dug into it.

“I need to look at the other five,” she said.

“I figured.”

“And the rest of the entered stock before Friday.”

“I'll pull the folders as soon as we're done here.” I held the gate open again and she came through with the folder under her arm. She stopped just outside, and for a moment she stood in the full hammer of the July sun with her hand tight on that folder and her eyes somewhere else, working through something she wasn't going to say out loud yet.

I didn't push her. I'd never pushed her. That wasn't my job and it wasn't who I was.

She turned and looked at me—really looked, the way she rarely let herself, and for a half-second I felt the full weight of it the way I always did and did nothing about, the same way I'd done nothing about it for years. There wasn't a version of this where Sadie Hollister needed me for anything more than holding gates and pulling folders and standing at her shoulder when the pressure came from directions she shouldn't have to face alone. That was what I was for.

It was enough. It had to be.

“This is going to land on me,” she said.

“Probably.”

“Whatever this is—whoever signed that certification—the name people are going to say is Hollister.”

“People already say Hollister for a lot of things.”

Something flickered across her face, and I couldn't tell if it was almost-humor or the beginning of something harder.

“Thank you,” she said. “For calling me. Instead of just⁠—”

“Logging it and letting it go?”

“Yes.”

I looked at her for a beat. “That was never going to happen.”

She held my gaze a moment longer than either of us expected, and then she turned toward the next pen, and I fell into step beside her—not ahead, not behind—just right next to her because that was where I'd always been.

CHAPTER 2

SADIE

The next pen held a black steer that looked solid when I ran my hands down his legs and checked his feet. His paperwork showed the wrong lot number, though. Off by three digits. Small enough someone could call it a clerical error, but I wasn't buying that for a second.