With shaking fingers, I answered.
“Hello?”
“O,” West said, his voice hoarse. Flat. Stunned.
My heart dropped into my ass.
“What’s going on, little brother?”
“I…”
I heard it then, and it had the hair on my arms rising. In the background, someone let out a keening wail, the sound so full of pain and despair it shot me right in the chest. My blood ran cold.
“West,” I said sternly, my tone edged in panic. “What happened?”
“It’s Dad,” he said, voice cracking on the last word. “He’s g-g-g-gone!”
And then my heart stopped.
I tried, unsuccessfully, to get him to explain further, but he’d started crying so hard I couldn’t understand anything beyond his blubbering. After interminable minutes of freaking out but unable to get any answers, Trey came on the line.
“You gotta come home, big bro.”
That was it. Six words had me throwing random shit in my backpack, homework and dinner long forgotten.
My limbs were shaking so bad I could barely stand as I once again emerged into the living room, my teammates and their guests glancing up at me with wide eyes. My anguish must have beenwritten all over my face.
“What happened?” Bucky asked, setting his beer on our shitty coffee table and rising to his feet.
And so, for the first time, I uttered the words that would become the most painful new reality I’d ever have to endure.
“My dad died.”
I made the normally-nine hour drive from Eugene to Dusk Valley in just over seven, breaking more than a few traffic laws, ignoring every speed limit in my desperation to reach my family.
My dad died. My dad died. My dad died.
Those three words were an irritatingly persistent companion, a metronome marking the passage of time.
But I didn’t cry.
No, I saved that for the moment I pulled up in front of the main house on the ranch. When my mother walked out, right down the porch steps, and collapsed in my arms.
Together, we clung to each other, her hoarse sobs mixing with the fresh sounds of mine, my tears dampening the top of her head as hers soaked the front of my shirt. Suddenly, I was seven again and had just fallen off my horse, snapping my left tibia and fibula clean in half. That was the last time I’d cried so hard, and the last time my mother held me as I did.
I finally collected myself enough to inhale more than the shallowest of breaths, and I pulled back from my mom. Her face was pale beneath the pink splotches, eyes red-rimmed and puffy. She offered me a smile that wobbled at the edges, and I returned it.
“It’s good to see you, baby,” she said, reaching up to pat my cheek.
“I don’t understand,” I said. “What happened?”
“We don’t know the details yet,” she said. “He was out in pasture Y with the ranch hands installing a new fence and, according to them, he just dropped. There one second, gone the next. Oh, Owen,” she wailed, burrowing her face into my chest. “What are we going to do?”
Something clicked into place for me then, all of my tears magically drying up like I’d turned off a faucet. I couldn’t afford to fall apart, not when my entire family was busy doing the same thing. Not when Mom had just lost the love of her life, her soulmate, the man she should’ve grown old with. Someone had to hold it together, to handle funeral arrangements and all the other details that needed sorting now that he was gone.
Someone had to keep this family—and ranch—afloat.
At that moment, I decided thatsomeonewas me.
