“Come with me then. He’s in the corral.”
Gael’s reply was lost in the wind as the two men climbed into his truck and drove toward the barn.
Enya exhaled, her breath fogging the glass.
Who is he here for?
Realization slammed into her; the only horse in the corral these days was Rain.
No.
He can’t.
He wouldn’t.
But I knew he would.
The bed shifted as she sat down and wrapped her arms around herself. Enya from before would have lost her mind. She’d have marched out of this room and given them what for, demandingthey leave her boy alone. She was tempted, oh so tempted, but she just couldn’t do it.
She could hear the distant clatter of hooves, the low murmur of voices drifting toward the house from the barn.
Just go.
Tell them they can’t have him.
But the floor might as well have been quicksand. Even when she heard the trailer door bang open and Rain whinny, high and uneasy, she couldn’t make her feet move. She flinched when Gael’s truck roared back to life.
Enya launched herself off her bed and threw herself across the room just in time to see the trailer roll past, taking her heart horse with him.
“Rain.” The whisper ripped out of her mouth. “Oh my god, Rain.”
The trailer disappeared down the drive, dust rolling up behind it in a thick column that hung in the still air, and Enya pressed her forehead against the glass hard enough that it should have hurt, but all she felt was the cold seeping into her skin and the hollow ache spreading through her chest like someone had carved her out with a dull blade.
Rain is gone.
Her horse, her heart horse, the one thing in this whole goddamn world that had never asked her to be anything other than what she was, and she’d just stood here and watched them take him.
Her knees buckled, and she slid down the wall until her backside hit the floor, the carpet scraping against her palms as she triedto catch herself, and she couldn’t stop the sob that ripped out of her throat. “No, no, no, no.” The words spilled out in a broken rhythm, her breath coming in sharp gasps that burned in her lungs. “I didn't, I couldn't, I should have?—”
Done what?
Marched downstairs and told them to stop?
Faced her dad and demanded he explain why he was selling off the one piece of her life that still made some bit of sense?
The girl who could have done that was gone, buried somewhere in the wreckage of the horror of three months ago. She knew it, and she knew her dad knew it too. Enya wrapped her arms around her middle and rocked forward, her hair falling around her face in a curtain that shut out the world, but it didn't shut out the sound of Rain's whinny echoing in her head or the image of the trailer rolling past with her whole heart locked inside.
I didn’t think he meant it.
Rain. My Rainbow boy. I’m so sorry.
The door downstairs slammed, the sound hard enough to cut through the fog in her head, and her dad’s footsteps moved through the house toward the kitchen. The rage that spiked through her was so sudden and so vicious that for half a second she could breathe again, and could feel something other than the suffocating weight of fear and shame and helplessness that had wrapped around her throat for months.
Get up.
Go downstairs.
Make him bring him back.
