Page 12 of The Lonely Road

I check my watch; it’s five minutes past seven. Any minute now, she’ll walk through those front doors.

“There’s a whole biography in that qualification,” I murmur.

And that’s when it happens. She comes in with Bree Keaton. The room changes for me, and I think for Kaz, too.

Maybe he did stay the whole night at Bree’s ranch, fixin’ her pump.

CHAPTER 4

taya

In Aspen, I had an office with a view of the mountains, a Herman Miller leather chair, and a Jacques Deneef mahogany desk—everything I’d once promised myself I’d have.

Now I have a desk Amos Langley gave me when he got a new one, and a folding metal chair that even Mac agrees looks unsafe. Instead of the original artwork the Aspen firm leased from museums, I have—just like I did in Aspen—a beaded tail bag my grandmother made for me when I passed the bar.

It hangs on the wall behind my desk, long and narrow, the panel tapering toward the bottom and ending in soft leather fringe. Tiny glass beads in red, turquoise, and cream stitched into geometric patterns—diamonds and stepped shapes, the lines so straight they look painted rather than sewn. Up close, you can see the hours in it, the patience, the way every bead sits exactly where it belongs. From a distance, the colors blur into something that reminds me of the land around Ignacio—red earth, blue sky, the pale spaces in between. Wíitsin said the colors were those of home, so I would never forget where I came from.

My office window overlooks the feed store. Instead of Maseratis, there’s usually a truck with a stock trailer—and once last week, an actual horse tied to the hitching post.

In Aspen, clients came in tailored suits, already knowing what outcome they wanted. Here, people come in wearing dust and worry and sit across from me and say: “I don’t even know if I need a lawyer, but something doesn’t feel right.”

There, I moved water on paper. Here, water rights mean whether a family keeps their land.

The office smells like coffee and old wood and, very faintly, the linseed oil I used on the windowsill last month when the paint started to crack. It’s not a smell anyone would bottle. But it’s mine in a way nothing in Aspen ever was.

I am understandably bitter about Aspen. About how my life took a turn I don’t regret, but that hurt me in ways that left marks.

I don’t think about Griffin often. I’ve gotten good at not thinking about him, which is a different thing from being over it.

Oh, I’m over Griffin. Absolutely. But I’m not over how I let a man diminish me when I was supposed to be better than that. Griffin Cole was brilliant and careful, nearly a decade older, and had a way of making me feel—for long enough—that I was exactly where I was supposed to be. That the life we were building together was real. That the way he used my work, my contacts, my judgment to advance his own position was just the natural overlap of two people in the same field, in love.

It took two years to name it—another year to leave.

The thing I’m most ashamed of isn’t that I trusted him. People trust people—that’s not stupidity, it’s just being human. What I’m ashamed of is that I’m a lawyer. I argue for a living. I cross-examine. I find the weakness in every position. And I gave Griffin a pass I never would have given a witness on the stand.

I notice the time and know my eleven o’clock will be late, so I start the coffee. Clara Whitman is managing kids, a ranch, and a life that doesn’t leave room for punctuality. I understand. That’s the other thing about running McCready & Morningstar—I’m not billing my every precious hour.

In Aspen, everything was tracked in six-minute increments. Every phone call, every email, every moment accounted for and justified on a client’s bill. Here, I charge flat fees when I can, contingency when it makes sense, and sometimes I send an invoice I know will arrive after calving season, when people actually have money coming in.

My job isn’t merely to win cases. It’s to keep people out of court when I can, write wills that make sense, set up LLCs so a ranch survives the next generation, and explain contracts in plain English instead of legal Latin. Since I started, I’ve drafted grazing leases, water-sharing agreements, and right-of-way easements. I help people put land into family trusts, so the IRS doesn’t take half of it when someone dies.

I review mineral rights contracts and well agreements, and the handwritten partnership deals neighbors make over coffee that hold up fine until someone dies and the kids want everything in writing. And most importantly—the first case of its kind for me, representing the defense instead of the challenge—I’m defending Clara Whitman’s historic water rights in water court.

Clara walks in looking apologetic. I wave it off, pour a second cup, and set it in front of her before she’s fully in the chair. When I first met her, I hated how she held herself—careful, upright, bracing for the next thing to go wrong. She’d come in with documents she’d organized herself, edges aligned, labeled in her neat schoolteacher handwriting. Deke would’ve done it on the ranch computer, she told me. He was good at the paperwork side. She was learning.

I keep telling her she’s doing well because she needs to hear it.

“They sent more documentation?” she asks.

“This morning.” I slide the filing across the desk. “It’s the same play—flood us with paper until we can’t keep up. I know how it works because I used to run it.”

She looks at the stack with the expression of someone receiving a bill they already knew was too high. “So they just want to bleed me out.”

“They’re going to try.” I lean forward. “We’re not going to let them.”

She meets my eyes the way she does whenever I say something definitive—wanting to believe it and afraid to because hope is something she can’t quite afford. It does something to me every time.

“My hydrology expert gets qualified next week. Once his testimony is on record, their prior appropriation argument falls apart at the foundation. After that —” My phone buzzes. I silence it. “After that, they either settle or we go to court.”