My husband had spent years warning me never to set foot on that farm. So after he passed away and the lawyer handed me the key, saying that from now on the place belonged to me, I was ready to sell it right away and put everything behind me. But before making my final decision, I still wanted to see it once for myself. When the door opened, I finally understood why, all those years, he had never wanted me to set foot there.

“I want my daughter back,” I said.

Ellis nodded once.

“Then start with her.”

I watched a week of videos in one night.

By the time dawn came again to Maple Creek Farm, I had a legal strategy, a geological education I never asked for, and a worse understanding of how precisely my husband had anticipated his brothers’ psychology.

“They’ll divide and conquer if they can,” Joshua said in the fourth day’s recording. He was seated in the library again, sleeves rolled up, a legal pad on the desk beside him. “Robert will play reasonable. Allan will play inevitable. David will watch and feed them what they miss. If they have any route to Jenna, they’ll take it. She wants connection when she’s grieving. That’s not a weakness. It’s just where the opening is.”

In another video, he walked the western rise while wind tore at his jacket and the foothills stood blue in the distance.

“This land looks worthless if you don’t know what you’re seeing,” he said, panning the camera across scrub, rock, and difficult grades. “That’s why it matters.”

He was right, of course. The western section was beautiful in a stern, American-West kind of way, if a person had the eye for it. Rugged. Difficult. Unadvertised. The sort of terrain developers called impractical and horse people called honest.

By late morning I had arranged to meet Jenna in a café in the nearest town, neutral ground, far enough from the farm to cut the emotional theatrics and close enough to keep her from being fully absorbed into her uncles’ orbit before I could reach her.

The town itself was the kind of place that could have existed in Montana, Wyoming, or rural Colorado if you blurred the flags and road signs. Grain elevators. A feed store. A diner with a hand-painted sign in the window promising all-day breakfast. Pickup trucks parked diagonally on Main Street. A church, a hardware store, a Tim Hortons attached to a gas station. Places like that tend to look simple until you realize they contain enough memory to outlast whole cities.

Jenna arrived fifteen minutes late in a camel coat and city boots not made for slush or gravel. She looked beautiful, tired, and defended.

“I can’t stay long,” she said instead of hello. “Uncle Robert is taking me to meet the family attorney this afternoon.”

Uncle Robert.

I stirred my coffee slowly. “That was fast.”