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“Thanks,” I said. “Jasper is not coming.”

“If you don’t want him, he’s not invited,” Daphne said, knowingly.

“I’m going home,” Mom said. “I’m too shaken.”

She disappeared like nothing happened as we navigated through the blaring sounds of alarms coming from cars with hail damage.

Despite that, Cal held me close, “I am so proud of you, Chlo. Don’t listen to anyone else. You are amazing, inspiring, and most of all, you’re brave. It’s like rain on a wedding day. Don’t let it get you down or hold you back.”

I sniffled, hoping he was right. But I couldn’t help but think that it was the only sort of wedding day I’d ever have and a tornado upstaged me.

5. A DISASTER

COLE

“I need a pry bar,” my brother Kevin said. “Shine the light down here, kid.”

Piper aimed the flashlight as I passed the tool.

“It was the only way to open the other one,” I said. “Told you.”

“I feel bad for destroying these stalls, man.”

“We don’t have a roof,” I sighed. “It ripped the doors off. It’s not worth worrying about.”

“Cash, girl, it’s only a few more minutes,” Piper said for her own benefit.

In the stall, Cash munched hay, unshaken by any safety worries.

“Mother… fuck!” Kevin pushed all his weight against the bar.

He tried again, this time yanking the stall open. The slightly bent steel bars finally gave.

Most stalls had fared better, but when the tornado ripped the main doors open, the hay wagon and wheelbarrow had been tossed around, damaging Cash’s stall and that of Logan, a bombproof boarder horse. Unlike Cash, he was much more shaken than her. After We found him pacing and rearing, we freed him first. The roof was gone. Things were physically warped from the tornado. Horses on the ends had minor cuts from debris. Doobs was spared from a piece of siding by some miracle and the stall door’s strong pine. It hung there, halfway through the wood on its razor-sharp edge as a reminder of what happened.

“Piper! Piper!” I heard Brynn’s voice as Piper led Cash down the barn aisle.

Predictably, Piper ignored her mother in a way that killed me. Piper asked to live with me during the divorce. Things were chilly until her mother married the man whose frame I recognized in the glow of Brynn’s headlights.

“Piper!” Brynn said, exasperated and frightened.

“Brynn, she’s… upset,” I said. “I told her you would come and get her. But she’s so focused on Cash right now.”

“Where is she putting the horse?” Brynn asked.

“Out in the lone pasture that still has fencing,” I answered.

We’d painstakingly surveyed every inch of fence line—replacing boards using the gator. As of now, that was the lone operable vehicle on the property. By some miracle, we only had to replace five boards.

“You’ve got them all in the same pasture?”

“It’s not ideal, but it’s all we can do right now. That one was not damaged. The shelter is mostly in one piece.”

“You’ve got your stallion out there?”

Brynn acted like stallions were fire-breathing dragons. She was not a horse person. It was red flag number one and should have been enough to send me running away. Still, I fell in love with her hook, line, and sinker at a dive bar when she was a college student and I was cutting my teeth in corporate real estate.

“Yes, Brynn.”