POV: Jasmine
The coffee was almost done when my phone lit up with Leo's name.
Aurora didn't look up from the cabinet hinge she'd been investigating for the past six minutes — turning the small brass mechanism with the focused, unhurried intensity she applied to every new mechanical problem.
As though the hinge had offered her a puzzle and she intended to solve it thoroughly before moving on.
She got that from Liam. The refusal to leave a thing half-understood.
I picked up.
"Morning," Leo said, and the word arrived with the unhurried quality his voice had learned to carry.
His voice still caught me slightly off guard every time — not because it was unfamiliar, but because it was so far from what it used to be.
Unhurried. Nothing underneath it pushing forward except genuine interest in whatever he was about to ask.
He'd earned that quality the way you earned anything real: by spending years without it, learning what its absence had been costing.
"Morning," I answered. "You're up early. What time do they start asking for things?"
"Horses don't negotiate on schedule," he replied, dry and warm in equal measure. A pause, easy and unforced. "How are you doing? Not how's the job, not how's Aurora. How are you."
Not how Aurora was doing, or Liam, or the job — the specific, narrow question, aimed precisely at me.
He knows, I remembered. I told him the outline, not the full story — that wasn't mine to tell in its entirety. But enough that he understood why things were shifting.
"I don't know yet," I told him honestly. "I'm still in the middle of figuring that out."
"That's a better answer than pretending you do," he replied. "Most people would've picked something easier."
"I'm aware." I watched Aurora transfer her attention from the hinge to the small magnetic latch beside it, fingers patient and methodical. "I'm trying to locate the actual feeling underneath the version I've been presenting. I haven't finished yet."
"You'll tell me when you land on it," he observed. Not a question — the easy confidence of someone who knew I would.
"Leo." I wrapped both hands around my mug. "I want to tell you more about what Asher found. The actual shape of it, not just that something was found."
A beat of quiet. Attentive, not waiting.
"I'm listening," he replied. "Take whatever space you need to say it the way it deserves."
"He found letters," I began, keeping my voice level, watching Aurora so I had somewhere to put my eyes. "Filed at a solicitor's in London. Both brothers' names on the file — Liam and Asher, jointly."
"The letters themselves span years," I continued. "The date range starts four years after Jackson told them their mother was dead."
The silence on Leo's end shifted.
It wasn't shocked silence — it was the silence of someone running logic carefully, not wanting to arrive at the conclusion before it had time to feel true.
I recognized it because I'd produced that same silence the night Liam told me on the kitchen floor and I'd held his hand and run the same logic: four years.
Four years of letters from a woman Jackson had declared dead — from a story with an architect who had a name.
"Four years after he said she was gone," Leo repeated quietly. "That's not a gap. That's a decision."
"Yes," I answered. "And that's the part that won't stop sitting in the room with you."
Aurora abandoned the latch and crawled two purposeful feet toward the lower cabinet, where the hinges were larger and presumably more interesting.
She settled in front of it with the air of someone who had planned this all along.
"So Jackson managed what the brothers knew," Leo noted. "He didn't just tell them she was dead. He maintained it. For years."
"That's what the date range suggests," I replied. "The letters were filed at a solicitor's — which means she put them somewhere they'd eventually be found, even if she couldn't deliver them herself."
"She built a contingency," I continued. "She planned for the version of things where she couldn't be there in person."
Another silence, and it was longer this time.
He was doing what the ranch had taught him — sitting with information until he understood its weight. A year ago he would have reacted first and understood later.
"If Jackson built that story about their mother," Leo said slowly, "and maintained it, and filed it away neatly enough that two grown men believed it for years —"
"Then the story we were given about our father," I said, "might have the same architecture."
I hadn't meant to finish his sentence. The logic was identical and I'd already run it privately in the two days since Liam had told me.
I'd set it aside because there was enough already happening without pulling that thread before I had anything solid to pull on.
"Yeah," he answered quietly. "That's what I was afraid you were going to confirm."
"I don't have anything real yet," I told him. "Just the shape of what Asher found, and the fact that the shape is familiar."
"I know," he replied. "I'm not asking you to hand me something you don't have. I've been sitting with the outline long enough. I'm good at waiting."
Aurora had worked the lower cabinet open and was peering inside at the stack of baking trays with great seriousness, as though they represented the next phase of her investigation.
She had no idea that both adults on this call were recognizing that every story they'd ever been handed about their families might have been written by someone with a reason to lie. She was interested in the trays. The contrast was clarifying.
"I'll tell you when I know something real," I said. "Not the outline. The actual thing."
"That's all I'm asking." A pause, and then the register of his voice shifted — not heavier, exactly. More deliberate. "Jasmine."
"Yeah," I answered, and the one syllable did the work of every word I didn't have yet to put around it.
"I've been sitting with it too," he told me. "The shape of what might be under our version of things. I haven't gone looking because I needed to hear yours first."
"When you know something real about theirs," Leo added, "tell me. I think it's going to matter for ours."
The word ours landed with the full weight he'd put behind it.
I stood there with my coffee going lukewarm and Aurora reorganizing the baking trays, feeling the full weight of what my brother had just said — not as a warning, not as a request.
As a fact he'd already quietly accepted, waiting for the evidence to catch up.
"I will," I told him. "When I have something concrete, you'll be the first call I make."
He said goodbye with the ease of someone who didn't require ceremony for it. The line went quiet.
I set the phone down and looked at Aurora, who had selected a muffin tin and was examining its indentations with full absorption.
Ours, I thought again.
The coffee had gone cold.