CHAPTER ONE
SIX YEARS AGO
Near Claremore, OK
Gray
The bay gelding huffed, his ears twitching, as Doc Lawrence slid his hand over its ribs. General has been lethargic for the past couple of weeks and in the past few days, he’s not interested in his food. For a fourteen-year-old horse, he's still beautiful with his coal black tail and mane; he was born with black socks halfway up each leg, but as he got older a layer of snow-white formed around his hooves.
My younger brother, Mason, raised him, they used to be inseparable, but he hasn’t been around much for the past eight years. Not since he was forced to join the military for defending our sister when they were eighteen.We all know General misses him, our sister, Marley, insists he misses him every day.
Marley is standing at his front, scratching the white star on his forehead as I stand back and watch the vet. My gut’s been telling me something is wrong for weeks, some signs I’ve seen in the past are there, but my hope has been that maybe he just has a bug and I’ll get a prescription.
General rears his head and moves to the side a step when Doc Lawrence’s hand moves over his flank toward his under region. That’s not a good sign, Marley shushes him and presses her forehead to his. We’ve both seen this before and when I look at Marley, her eyes are closed, and she’s giving General all the affection he wants.
Knowing that General can sense our emotions, I try to be as casual as possible. Marley has always had a connection with horses, and I swear she can communicate with them. But General is Mason’s horse, and Mason is her twin. Marley and Mason have always been two sides of the same coin, and she knows it will kill him that he couldn’t be here.
She’s also carried the guilt of knowing Mason was sent away because he was protecting her. If it weren’t for that night, he would be here.
Movement in my peripheral pulls my attention to the main house up the hill, my youngest sister Breanna is running to the barn, frantically waving her arms and yelling my name. The high school bus just dropped her off about thirty minutes ago, and I’m wondering what could have happened between now and then.
Dad hears the panic in her voice and walks out of the tack room, which is also his office, and stands next to me, we both watch her running down the hill. Her long wavy hair is blowing around her, fear in her big blue eyes. She keeps yelling my name, and Dad and I quickly begin to walk toward her.
“Gray! Gray!” The closer she gets, the higher pitched her voice becomes and I start to run to meet her.
Her petite body crashes into me, and I grab her arms because she nearly falls in her heightened state. “Breanna, what is it? What’s wrong?”
She’s breathing so hard that she can’t talk, and her fingers are digging into the skin on my forearms. She starts to pant, “Sarah, Sarah.”
Sarah is my wife who is in town taking our three-year-old daughter, Lainey Rai, to her well-baby visit, and my heart jumps in my chest as my own alarm skitters up my spine. “What, Breanna? What about Sarah?”
As she is trying to breathe, her eyes are filling with tears. “Sarah! She was in an accident!”
It’s taking everything in me to not match Breanna’s panic as my mind spins. “Breanna, calm down and tell me what’s happened.”
Through sobs, she tells me about the call from a police officer in Owasso, who asked us to meet them at the hospital. He wouldn’t give her any information but asked us to get there quickly. As she is relaying the message, I realize I left my phone in my jacket in General’s stall, so they called the house phone.
I turn and look at my dad, dread oozing out of every pore. Surely, he can tell me everything is okay, and we just have to go get them because her SUV is not drivable. I want him to tell me my wife and daughter are fine. Instead, he keeps the cool mask on his face as he looks at Breanna and in his gravelly voice says, “Go tell Doc Lawrence what you just told us, so he knows why we left and stay here with Marley. I’ll call as soon as we can.”
Dad grabs my arm and we run to my truck. I don’t remember much about the drive to the hospital, all I could think about was Sarah’s smile as she carried Lainey Rai onher hip before she left. She gave me a kiss and said she would be back in a couple of hours.
Lainey Rai gave me a kiss on my cheek and in her three-year-old voice said, “Uv ya.”
My thoughts go to the conversation about Lainey Rai’s pronunciation, and I wonder why we were making such a big deal about whether she was pronouncing her L’s or not. It seems so insignificant right now.
Are they okay?
I don’t know how many traffic laws I’ve broken on the drive, but when we get to the hospital, all I can think about is getting to my wife and daughter. Dad keeps up with me the entire way as I run from the parking lot to the emergency room desk.
The woman behind the desk looks at me like I’m just another person, doesn’t she know my wife and daughter are back there somewhere, damn it? She even has the audacity to tell me to calm down. I’ve never wanted to hit a woman like I wanted to hit her in that moment.
The far-away rumble of my dad’s voice gets my attention. “Gray, we have to stay calm, they’re getting the doctor.”
My dad is well versed in hospitals. My mom died almost eighteen years ago after giving birth to Breanna. The infection she developed after they went home from the hospital with my youngest sister was quiet as it poisoned her body, and by the time they got her back to the hospital, it was too late.
Dad became mom and dad that day, and even though he’s never been an affectionate man, preferring tough love over hugs, all his children felt his love every day.
The world flips on its side when the doctor comes out and tells me the woman who has been the love of my life since we were sixteen ‘succumbed’ to her injuries. The woman who gave me my daughter and filled every dark space in my life with light ‘succumbed’ to being t-boned by someone who hadbeen day drinking.
