Even if it meant reaching for someone who might never answer.
WINNIE
Without you in it
Saint Francis Hospital, Tulsa
2:17 AM
"The worst distance isn't measured in miles—it's measured in silences you can't bridge."
– Unknown
***
The waiting room had become my prison.
It was a purgatory of beige walls, fluorescent lights humming their incessant drone, and chairs upholstered in some scratchy material designed to prevent comfort. I'd been here for ten hours. Ten hours since they'd wheeled Pops through those double doors, his weathered hand squeezing mine one last time before the anesthesiologist inserted the IV that made his fierce eyes go glassy and vacant.
Ten hours of watching that digital board above the nurse's station, waiting forIN PROGRESSto change to anything—RECOVERY,ICU, evenCOMPLICATIONSwould be better than this endless, suffocating unknown.
The clock on the wall ticked forward with cruel precision: 2:17 AM.
The hospital at night was a different beast—quieter, lonelier. The daytime bustle was replaced by a skeletal crew of night nurses moving like ghosts through dimmed corridors. Somewhere down the hall, a monitor beeped steadily. A phone rang at the nurse's station. Life continuing, indifferent to my falling apart.
Cassie had left around midnight after I'd practically shoved her out the door. She had work in four hours—opening the bar, bills to pay, a life that couldn't pause indefinitely for my crisis. She'd fought me on it, of course, that stubborn loyalty that made her family even when blood said otherwise. But eventually, she'd relented.
"Text me the second he's out," she'd whispered against my hair. "I don't care what time. And eat something, Win. You look like a ghost."
She'd pressed a crumpled twenty into my palm for the vending machines, kissed my forehead, and left me in this fluorescent tomb with my spiraling thoughts and a burnt coffee that tasted like liquid despair.
I couldn't eat. Couldn't sleep, though my body screamed for it. I just sat, staring at my phone like it held answers. Like maybe if I willed it hard enough, the universe would give me something to hold onto.
Four days.
Ninety-six hours since Beau had kissed me goodbye at the airport. His touch lingering on my cheek, his voice steady with promises he hadn't kept.
Which left the other option: he was avoiding me.
Maybe Dallas had swallowed him whole. Maybe his family had reminded him who he really was—a Sterling, not some ranch hand playing cowboy for a summer fling with a girl who smelled like hay and had dirt permanently under her nails. Maybe he'd looked at that skyline from his penthouse and realized Oklahoma was just a detour. A rustic adventure he could tell at cocktail parties.Remember that time I slummed it in the heartland?
The thought made my chest ache, but I'd been holding it together.Fine, I'd kept telling myself. That mantra Jamesons lived by. We survived. We adapted. We didn't need anyone else because needing meant weakness.
But sitting here, ten hours into Pops' surgery, staring at a digital board that refused to update, the armor cracked.
I'd drafted a hundred texts. Deleted them all.
Miss you so much I can't breathe.Too raw.
Where the hell are you?Too angry.
Pops fell. It's bad. I need you.Too vulnerable. Too much like admitting I couldn't carry this alone.
At 2:17 AM, watching that clock tick forward, I stopped caring about pride.
My hands trembled as I opened his contact—Beau Sterling, the photo from the Rusty Spur where he was mid-laugh, black Stetson tilted back. It hurt to look at. I hit call before I could spiral into second-guessing.
It rang. Once. Twice.
