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.

“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.