“No,” Charlie says quickly. “I can do it.”
He reaches for the shirt and presses it against himself. Placing one arm under his back and the other under his knees, I lift him into the air. Susan holds the side gate open for me, and I stride through.
“We’ll keep Peyton with us,” she tells me.
Brock opens the back seat of my truck and I pause, looking at Anna. “There’s a blanket in the bed, can you grab it?”
She does as I’ve asked, spreading the navy blue blanket across the leather. The Hayden Cattle Company logo embroidered on the corner faces me. I get Charlie buckled in and climb into the driver’s seat.
Without a pause, Anna hauls herself into the passenger seat. For a second I stare at her, dumbfounded. We could be seventeen again, the way she just jumped into my truck and looked across the center console at me.
I shift into drive, one hand giving a terse wave out my open window, and head for the emergency room.
“You good, bud?” I ask Charlie.
Anna looks back at him.
“Yeah,” he responds. “It stings.”
I hold up a thumbs-up sign and hope he sees it. “They’ll have something to help with that. Just hang on a little longer.”
My forearm rests on my center console as I take the familiar turns through Sierra Grande. At first, it’s a soft touch on my elbow. A gentle grazing down my arm. Then Anna’s fingers slide over the back of my hand, coming to rest on my own, squeezing me.
I meet her gaze in the enclosed space. I don’t need to ask her what she’s thinking. I can see it plain as day on her face.Thank you,she says,I’m glad you were there.
In the end, Charlie gets seven stitches.
And me? I’m hoping Anna comes home and stitches our family back together.
4
Tenley
“Are you sure?”Jasper asks, her nose scrunched and her eyebrows raised. Through the screen we’re talking on, I watch her grab a cup of yogurt and a spoon.
“Yes,” I answer, setting my laptop on the counter in my parents’ kitchen. I face the computer toward the Malibu beach on purpose, to make my sister jealous. The effort is probably wasted. She prefers the view of the Manhattan skyline from her Brooklyn apartment. “Besides, I don’t have a choice. I signed a contract, remember?”
Jasper gathers her dark hair over one shoulder. Like our parents, she has an olive complexion and dark brown hair. With my fair skin and blonde hair, I am the odd woman out.
For the past five minutes, Jasper has been trying to talk me out of filming. “Arizona, though? I just think of dirt and tumbleweeds.” Jasper shudders and I roll my eyes.
“If you have suggestions regarding where I should film a movie about a woman who inherits a cattle ranch, I’m open to hearing them.” My stomach grumbles and I cover it with a hand. I don’t usually wait so long to have breakfast, but my mom asked me to come eat with her and my dad before I leave town.
Jasper lifts her hands. “Fine, you’ve made your point. At least you’ll have Calvin with you, so you won’t get lonely.”
“True.” Calvin Lawrence has been my friend since we acted in a teenage variety show, and I was happy to hear he’d signed on to play my love interest. He’s a great actor, and I already know we have good chemistry.
“Is Mom excited?” Jasper holds the spoon in her mouth as she asks the question.
I purse my lips and look out to the living room, where my mom had walked through just before my video call with Jasper. “For the most part,” I answer. It’s the truth… kind of. My parents are very excited to get the movie filmed and distributed. My mom has dollar signs in her eyes, and I don’t blame her. If the movie flops, my parents will lose everything. The Malibu house I’m standing in, the place in Aspen, and who knows what else. But Jasper doesn’t know any of that. If I hadn’t overheard their conversation two months ago, I wouldn’t know about their current situation either.
They hadn’t known I was at their house, and they’d come home arguing. It wasn’t just a little disagreement, either. It was a balls to the wall, all cards on the table screaming match. Never, in the entire time I lived with them, had I heard them behave that way. They’d spotted me, frozen in place in my seat at the dining room table, and scrambled for everything except the truth. But I’d heard what I’d heard and there was no way to sugarcoat it.
“Anything new with Tate?” Jasper asks, making her voice light on purpose.
“He’s called a few times, I let it go to voicemail.”
“So that’s it? You’ll just never talk to him again?”
