Page 51 of Captive

In the parking lot afterward, she walks next to my crutches without offering to help and without slowing down so much that it becomes help anyway.

“Tomas Reyes,” she says.

I stop.

“The man you pulled off the night shift. With the baby.” She doesn’t look at me. She looks at the sunset over the machine yard. “You said his name in the shed like you hadn’t let yourself remember it in two years.”

“I hadn’t.”

“Find him.”

“I called his old number from the county car while the investigator was sealing the board,” I say. “It still works. He drives for a feed company in Alice now. I told him what I did and why I did it. I told him I owe him twelve hours plus two years of interest, and that it’s coming from my account, not the ranch’s. And that he can tell whoever he wants.”

She turns her head and looks at me.

“What did he say?”

“He said his daughter’s three now. He said he figured I was just one more boss who didn’t want to be asked questions.” My throat is tight. “He said nobody ever called him back about anything before.”

Sofia doesn’t say anything.

Then she takes my truck keys out of my shirt pocket, the ones I’m not cleared to use, and walks around to the driver’s side.

“Get in,” she says. “I’m taking you home.”

She doesn’t say whose. I don’t ask.

I get in.

Chapter 15

Sofia

At six in the morning, I put my own name in the center of a blank sheet and start proving where I wasn’t.

My temporary office is one folding table and two loaner laptops at the released edge of my clinic parking lot, next to a printer that objects to heat. My real computers are still sealed inside the building behind yellow tape.

Cole slept at his rental last night. I drove him there myself after the shed and left him on his own porch, because I needed one night to think and he didn’t ask me for anything. In the rearview mirror, he stood under his porch light on his crutches until I turned the corner. Then I went home and stood in my kitchen with my hand on the counter, surprised by how empty the house felt. I’d lived there alone four years. It had never once felt empty before.

I don’t let myself think about that. I open the files.

The pattern takes an hour to show itself. Every forged certificate borrows a real number from a real certificate I actually issued, for other animals, other clients, other states. My real records are untouched. Nobody changed my account. Somebody photographed my work, swapped out everything that mattered, and kept my name on top.

Tessa Rowe sits across the table with the ranch’s receiving files. She doesn’t touch mine and I don’t touch hers. It’s the most restful working relationship I’ve had in years.

The treatment sheets are worse. The medicine on them doesn’t add up, and one safe-to-eat date lands before the shot it’s supposed to follow. They made the cattle look safe on paper by erasing the only information that would keep them off a plate.

People eat these animals. That’s the part nobody writing this paper cared about.

The trailer’s paper lists a destination I read twice: Barbed Crown south lease access.

“That’s a road,” I say. “Not a ranch.”

Tessa pulls up the map. “It’s a gate on an old grazing lease. No cattle assigned there now.”

Around seven, Tessa caps her pen and says, without looking up, “Can I tell you something that isn’t in either of our files?”

“That depends on what it is.”