“I’m afraid I was a bit snobbish about it. City girl bias, I guess. I knew you grew up on a ranch, and I guess I had some preconceived notions about country boys. Then I saw you standing there and they all blew up.” She laughed, clearly at herself, which he found...he wasn’t sure what. “I should have known cowboys have been a thing with women for so long for a reason.”

He stood up suddenly. The last of his coffee sloshed in the cup. “Why are you doing this?”

“What? Remembering? You started it, if you recall.”

“Talking to me. Talking to me like...a friend.”

“We’re not friends,” she said, in what he could have sworn was a sad tone. “I know that it will take a lot more than an apology to make up for a mistake five years long.”

“You have nothing to make up for.”

“Oh, but I do. I misjudged and blamed and—”

“Amanda—”

“I had someone within reach who knew, admired and respected my father, and whom he felt the same way about, and I turned my back on him because I was too wrapped up in my own pain to see the truth.” She gave a quiet little sigh. “And if you hate me for that, it’s only what I deserve.”

Adam gaped at her. He felt disoriented, as if the entire world had flipped on him. She thought he hated her?

“And,” she went on when he kept staring at her, speechless, “I can see I have my work cut out for me.” Then, with the flashing smile he remembered from that day, she added, “But my father was right when he told you how stubborn I can be.”

He still didn’t believe her.

Amanda kept her gaze fixed on the whiteboard they’d set up in the office, the large rectangle her father had used so often in this very room. It had taken her a while to find the pens for it, and only two of them still wrote after all this time. But by limiting things to the two basic categories—what they knew and what they were guessing at—it was enough. They were looking for connections. And right now she couldn’t see any new ones, most especially anything that would connect Malachi to the mysterious Pix.

“You don’t need to worry at the moment about whether we can prove it,” Quinn had said before he’d gone to catch a few hours of sleep. Leaving the ever-watchful Cutter with them again.

But out of the corner of her eye she saw Adam, also staring at the board, reach down to scratch behind Cutter’s right ear. “So when do you get a solid night’s sleep, dog?”