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“Made it,” she announced proudly as I peeled my fingers off the door handle.

The rodeo grounds hit me like sensory whiplash. Dust rose in golden swirls as I walked, weaving through clusters of people shouting and laughing over the music. Cowboys stretched near the pens like they were warming up to fistfight God, their muscles rolling under worn denim and flannel.

I slowed at the fence, my pulse flickering.

This wasn’t Boston.

This wasn’t the house that creaked with every mistake I’d ever made.

This was loud. Messy. Alive.

Too alive, if you’d asked the flustered atoms currently vibrating inside me.

A woman strutted past us in a full pink-rhinestone cowgirl getup—hat, boots, fringe, the works—sparkling like she’d been bedazzled by celestial beings with poor impulse control.

“I feel underdressed,” I muttered.

Hattie clicked her tongue. “Tourist,” she said, like it was both a diagnosis and a warning.

We climbed the bleachers, the boards creaking under our steps. Somewhere below, a metal gate clanged shut, and the sound knifed through me in a way I knew too well. It was the same sound that used to crack the air right before everything went wrong.

Right before the shouting.

Right before the pain.

Then…against my will, I was back in Boston.

The bedroom light glares down on me, too bright, outlining every detail too clearly. The air feels tight in my chest, as if the room itself knows what’s coming. He’s already pacing, muttering under his breath.

The crash comes without warning.

He yanks the lamp from the nightstand and hurls it against the wall beside me. It shatters, glass spraying across the hardwood and skittering around my feet as if it’s trying to flee before he can step on it.

I go still. My lungs locked and my pulse hammering in my throat. Freezing always feels safer than moving when he’s in one of these moods.

“Sienna,” he snaps, like my name is a curse.

He comes toward me fast, and I instinctively step back, but not far enough and not nearly in time. His hand clamps around my arm, the pressure biting, and before I can find my footing, he shoves me.

My body slams into the corner of the dresser. Pain detonates through my side, a sickening crack followed by a burst of heat under my ribs. One broke. Maybe two. Every breath scrapes like something inside me has shifted wrong⁠—

“Sienna, it’s starting!” Hattie’s voice jolted me up and out of the memory, ripping me back to the present. The roar of the arena filled my ears.

There was a dull ache pressed beneath my ribs that remembered more than I wanted it to. I forced the memory to retreat, folding it back into the dark where it belonged.

“Right,” I said, clearing my throat. “I’m so…excited to see this.”

It came out thin and half-hearted. Hattie shot me a look but didn’t press, she just nudged my shoulder gently as the first gate swung open.

We climbed a few more steps and sat down, wedged between two flirting teenagers, oblivious to the world, and a kid wearing spurs and an oversized cowboy hat who looked like he was judging everyone as if he owned the arena.

Hattie handed me a lemonade she must have snagged while I’d been lost in thought and immediately tore into a bag of kettle corn, blissfully unbothered by anything except sugar intake. I took a cautious sip, letting the tartness settle my nerves while the crowd buzzed around us in a loose, excited hum.

For a moment, it almost felt safe, just me and my lemonade, minding our business and not courting disaster the way I usually managed to even while sitting still.

Until the announcer’s voice sliced through the arena like fate clearing its throat just for me. “Next rider up…Sterling Hayes!”

Every cell in my body short-circuited.