A Permanent Agreement

Dave Firestone was a man with a purpose. The future of his ranch was at stake, and he wasn't going to let rumors or a scandal ruin what had taken so many years to build. Several months had passed since Alex Santiago's disappearance, and Dave still felt like a cloud of suspicion was hanging over his head. It was time to find out what the sheriff thought about the matter. He got out of his SUV, pulled the collar of his leather jacket up, and squinted at the wind.
It was a cold October in East Texas, which meant winter would be even colder. He couldn't change that, but Dave had driven to the border of his ranch to try to straighten out at least part of his life. A tall man wearing a worn black leather jacket and a wide-brimmed brown hat was fixing the wire fence that separated his ranch, the Royal Round Up, from the neighboring ranch, the Battlelands. Behind the man in black was another man, Bill Hardesty, who worked for the neighboring ranch and was unloading wire mesh from an old pickup truck.
Dave greeted Bill and then approached Nathan Battle. He looked up when he saw him coming.-Hey, Dave, how are you?"Fine, " he replied, never admitting he had a problem if he couldn't solve it. "I was at your house, and Jake told me I could find you here. I didn't think I'd find the sheriff fixing the fence."Nathan shrugged and looked around before looking back at Dave."I like this kind of work. Here I have time to think and clear my head.
My brother does most of the hard work, but the ranch is mine too, and I like to help out, you know?"Then he smiled.-Also, Amanda is making a lot of changes to prepare for the baby's arrival, so there's always someone from Sam Gordon's company working at home, and I prefer to be here... quiet. Bill laughed.-Enjoy it while you can, boss. As soon as the baby's born, forget about peace and quiet. Nathan laughed too.-Just focus on unloading the wire, understood?Dave didn't play along.
He would have preferred Nathan to be alone, but he was going to talk to him anyway. Over the past few months, things had changed a lot at Royal. Nathan and Amanda had gotten married and were expecting a baby. Sam and Lila were expecting twin girls. And he had a reason why he needed to talk to Nathan on his day off. The disappearance of Alex Santiago. He couldn't say he'd ever been Alex's friend, but he'd never wished him any harm either.
His disappearance was so strange that everyone in town was talking about it, and many people were saying that Alex and he had been business rivals, and that perhaps he might have had something to do with it. He'd never cared what people said. He ran his life and his business as he saw fit, regardless of what others thought, but things had changed. And, as much as it bothered him, he had to admit that the rumors and the threat of scandal had brought him here, to talk to the sheriff.