A Divorce Lawyer From Manhattan Booked a Week at My Wyoming Guest Ranch. By Friday, She Was Fighting to Save It

My name is Wade Lawson. I’m 51, and I run a guest ranch in the mountains outside Jackson Hole, Wyoming.

People call it a dude ranch. I call it the only way to keep my family’s land.

Every summer, about two hundred guests come from New York and Chicago and Los Angeles. They ride horses, fish the creek, eat steak by the fire and go home feeling like cowboys.

My wife, Beth, ran the business side. I ran the horses.

She died three years ago. A brain aneurysm. She was laughing at something I said in the kitchen, and then she was on the floor.

Since then, the ranch has been sliding.

I’m good with horses. I’m terrible with spreadsheets. Bookings dropped. Repairs piled up. I took out a small business loan to fix the lodge roof, and then a second one to cover payroll.

Last summer, the bank in Jackson sent a letter. The loans had a clause I’d never read. If the ranch’s revenue fell below a certain number for two years, the bank could call the whole thing due.

I had until September.

That was where things stood the week Hannah Price arrived.

She got out of a black car at the lodge in white jeans and boots that had clearly never touched dirt. Long dark hair, sunglasses, phone glued to her ear.

“I’m sorry,” she said into the phone. “No, tell opposing counsel we’re not accepting that custody arrangement. I’ll call back.”

Then she looked up at me.

“Hi,” she said. “My sister booked this. I hate nature.”

“You’re going to love it here,” I said.

She lowered her sunglasses and looked at me for a second too long.

Then she said, very quietly, “Oh, no.”