Maybe. But the 7 months of legal pressure and sleepless nights and watching everything he'd built get chipped away by men with briefcases maybe that had contributed to a heart that had been perfectly healthy the previous January. Aldrick Main had signed the paperwork and the paperwork said heart failure and that was the end of what could be proven. Cole had stood at the back of Thomas's funeral as far from the front as he could position himself without being outside the building. He hadn't spoken to anyone, hadn't looked at anyone directly.
He'd driven home in the dark and sat at his kitchen table until 3:00 in the morning staring at nothing and feeling something he didn't have a name for made up of equal parts grief and guilt and a cold clear self-knowledge that he hadn't done what a brother should have done. He bought the ranch with Thomas's money. The land was gone by then. Greer's paperwork had been thorough. But there was the house sale, the equipment, the modest savings of a man who'd worked hard and planned carefully and died anyway.
Cole took the money and put it into the ground. He built the western fence line with his own hands that first winter. Post by post in the cold working until he was too tired to think about anything except the next post. Not as penance, he told himself. Just as work.
Just as the next thing that needed doing. There was one other thing Cole hadn't done. He hadn't gone to see Greer. After Thomas died, after the funeral, after the paperwork was signed and the land was gone and the money from the estate had been converted into the deed for the ranch Cole now stood on. He had thought about it.
Had thought about riding to whatever office or property or seat of power Greer occupied and saying something. He hadn't known what he would say. Just that some part of him felt that something needed to be said. He hadn't gone. He'd told himself there was no point.
That Greer would dismiss him. That making himself known to Greer would only invite the same machinery to turn in his direction. All of that was true. None of it was the real reason. The real reason was simpler and harder to admit.
He was afraid. And he had spent 9 years building a wall strong enough that most days he could mistake the fear for wisdom. The wall went up. Nine years it held. Birch had been with Cole for seven of those 9 years.
Nobody in Red Rock knew much about where Birch had come from originally and Birch himself didn't offer the information. Somewhere north, probably based on the particular weary respect he showed toward winter. The respect of a man who'd been genuinely threatened by it and survived mostly through stubbornness. He was in his mid-50s, built like he'd been assembled from spare parts that all happened to be the toughest available version of each component and he had a quality Cole had come to rely on without ever naming it directly. Birch showed up every morning without fail, without complaint, without needing to be told what needed doing.
He just appeared wherever the hardest work was and started doing it. Cole paid him fairly and left him alone and Birch worked and left Cole alone and the whole arrangement had the clean efficient quality of two people who understood each other perfectly without having exchanged more than a few hundred words about anything that mattered. Except except Cole had noticed things over the years. Small things. The way Birch went quiet when Greer's name came up in certain contexts.
Not obviously quiet. Just a stillness. A slight withdrawal like a man stepping back from a fire that was slightly too hot. The way Birch's eyes would sometimes drift east in the evenings and then come back with a fraction too much deliberateness like returning required a conscious decision. And the way Birch never, not once in 7 years, mentioned the land just east of Cole's property.
The land that had belonged to Coda. Cole had noticed. He hadn't asked because that was the arrangement. Silence for silence. Questions for no questions.
And it had worked. Right up until the evening of the 3rd of September when Cole rode out to the western fence line at the end of a long day and found something standing near the dead cottonwood trees that changed every calculation he'd ever made about what was and wasn't his business. The sun was going down red. Deeper red than usual. The kind of red that turned the dry grass into something that looked like fire without heat and drew the shadows out long and slow across the earth and made the air go very still in that particular way it did right before dark.
When even the birds decided they'd said enough for one day and went quiet all at once. Cole rode the western line the way he always did at this hour. Checking posts. Testing wire with his gloved hand as he passed. The horse knew the route well enough to navigate without much direction.
Cole let his mind drift to that comfortable half-empty place it reached at the end of a long productive day when the body was tired and the work was done and there was nothing left to solve until morning. He saw the shape near the cottonwood trees and his mind came back all at once. Still. Too still for an animal. Not hiding.
Not crouched. Not doing any of the things a living creature did when it registered an approaching horse. Just standing. Upright. With the particular quality of someone who had decided some time ago to be done with the effort of making themselves smaller.
Cole slowed his horse. Looked again. A woman. Dark hair pulled back from her face without care for how it looked. Clothes that had seen hard weather and hard use and hadn't been replaced because there was nothing to replace them with.