Chapter One
Irrevocably Changed
Colton
Christmas Night, 2023
She is calling me.
Quartz digs into my weaker hip and I have no doubt the bathroom mirror reflects the tension hovering between my shoulder blades through my flannel shirt. A lightbulb flickers above my head, the toilet makes the same gurgling noise it made two months ago, and the picture on the wall is sorely outdated, from when I was ten and gap-toothed.
None of it matters, because Cheyenne is calling me.
I don’t know why. She truthfully shouldn’t be calling me, considering everything, but I don’t care. My gaze lingers on her contact photo—Cheyenne, at our spot on the Falls Lake Beach several years ago, wearing my faded sweatshirt over a blue bikini—for three seconds before I answer the call.
“Cheyenne?” It shouldn’t come out as a question. I have Caller ID; I know it’s her.
But I guess that’s what happens when one’s best-friend-turned-stranger calls for the first time in five years, and it makes my mind run wild with possibilities. Maybe she’s calling because she misses us —belly laughs over sticky Hot Tamales at the scarred wooden table of the lake house, chapped fingers rubbing oil into fraying saddles, toilet papering her older brother’s cottage on his twenty-fifth birthday ten years ago. I don’t know what I’ll say if that’s the case, but I wish hope wouldn’t bubble in my chest.
Because when she speaks, I instantly know that’s not why she’s calling.
Of course, it’s not . Cheyenne married a different man, moved on with her life. The last thing she’d ever want from me is to reminisce on days long, long gone.
“Colt, I need you.” Her voice cracks on the single syllable of my name. Overhead, the light flickers out completely. It feels like an eerie parallel to this phone call. “It was so bad, Colt. The truck—It’s—It’s…”
My heart stops altogether and then starts up again at a rapid staccato. “Cheyenne. Hey. Take a deep breath. What are you talking about?”
“I—I can’t—”
Something shuffles near the speaker, maybe the skin of a palm, and then Beau’s voice is in my ear. And that’s when it starts to hit me, even though I don’t know what it is.
Just that it is very, very bad.
Life-alteringly so.
“Colt, hey, this is Beau,” Cheyenne’s brother says evenly. Like I wouldn’t recognize his voice if we were in a crowd of a thousand people and I was blindfolded and half deaf. You don’t play board games with Beau Kolter for two-thirds of your life and not know his voice. “There was an accident about an hour ago. Dad’s…”
Staggeringly, I grope for the counter behind me.
Gone.
He doesn’t say it. I don’t know if it’s because he can’t or because he knows he doesn’t have to, but my lungs deflate. Oxygen is nonexistent, like the time I fell from a horse during drills all those years ago and the wind was knocked out of my sails.
But back then, I sputtered a surprised laugh when I figured out how to breathe again, Cheyenne’s pale face too close to mine as she demanded to know I was okay and a very alive Tripp Kolter holding out a steady hand to help me to my feet.
“Beau, I don’t…understand.” I don’t. I can’t.
Tripp can’t be gone. He can’t. I haven’t been close with Cheyenne in half a decade, but her father is the man I’ve looked up to since I was six years old. The man who fixed more than my scraped knee and my flat bike tire that fateful day in May. I owe every success on the rodeo circuit to him. He has never failed to call me before a ride regardless of how busy he is at home. He’s the man who sat at the table with me, patiently helping me understand my homework, the one who tossed a football in the yard and treated me like I was a third son to him.
Tripp Kolter is more of a dad to me than my father has ever been.
“Can you come to the hospital?” Beau doesn’t answer my question, he just asks one. It prickles against my skin like a scratchy, over washed towel. “We don’t know if he’ll pull through surgery.” He pauses and lowers his voice. “Look, man. Chey needs you right now. I know things are tense between you two, but please. Please come.”
He’s not gone yet.
This realization—or, revelation—is the only thing that gives me the strength to nod my head. I open my mouth to respond, but Cheyenne’s voice comes back over the line before I can.
“Cole,” she whispers brokenly, “please come.”
“I’ll be there as fast as I can,” I vow, fumbling for the bathroom doorknob. I miss, and my thumb jams against the doorframe. “Hey, don’t hang up with me, okay? Stay on the line, Cheyenne. Please stay on the line.”
She doesn’t say anything, but her quivering sobs confirm we’re still connected. I feel like a walking paperweight. Jordan’s carrying a piece of paper as I follow him down the entryway hall to the kitchen, but I don’t think it’s a big deal until I take in my brother’s ashen expression. If possible, my stomach knots tighter.
“Uh, where’s Indi?” Graham asks. He sits at the kitchen table with Jolene, dark brows creased, a beaded bracelet in my niece’s hand. “And why do you look like you’ve seen a ghost?”
“I don’t know,” Jordan says, seeking Sydney’s gaze across the room. He lifts the paper in his hands limply. “This was all there was.”
I should be walking out the front door to a biting north wind stinging my cheeks. Trying to come up with something reassuring to say to Cheyenne as I back my truck up and hope to high heaven there’s not a cop around while I gun it to the hospital.
As it is, I’m so confused that I can’t do anything.
“What do you mean , she’s gone ?” Graham demands. His chair legs scrape scuffed wooden floors and he crosses the kitchen in long, purposeful strides. “Jordan, she was here ten minutes ago. She can’t be gone .”
Wordlessly, his fiancée, Ember Bryant, tucks herself under his arm. A hint of tension drains from Graham’s expression. Sydney does the same with Jordan, and even though my father is more unapproachable than a cactus right now, Hazel smooths a tender palm between his shoulder blades. Even Nash, Jordan’s former detective partner, seems to sense Gran’s need for support because he holds his arm out to her while he hugs Jolene into his body.
And here I stand like the loner I’ve always been, one foot in this world and one foot in another. Motionless, while courses of action are planned around me in both worlds.
Dad and Jordan grab for coats while Graham and Nash encourage them to think it through before taking off after Indi. Beau’s muffled voice is in my ear while he talks to someone in an authoritative tone and Cheyenne’s quiet, heartbreaking sobs whisper against my skin. Gran says something about trying to call Indi, and Ember and Sydney jump in to guide Jolene back to the kitchen table so they can continue making bracelets.
As if that’ll make things normal.
I open my mouth to say something, anything, but I have nothing to say. Possibly for the first time in my thirty years, I come up empty.
I just know that tonight, on Christmas, my life has been irrevocably changed.