Chapter 5
Evan
Tricky fucking things, memories.
Believing my memories, holding onto them, had been what made me forget the truth. That my brother wasn’t the guy I’d always believed he’d been.
He had been a criminal and a thief.
But when all I could remember about him was how he used to bring me candy from the shop in town when we were kids, or how he’d feed and water my horse so I could play, the bad things were easy to forget.
The drugs became easier and easier to forget. The break-ins and all the money he’d stolen from me and Dad. If he hadn’t died the night he’d robbed a jewelry store in Jackson, something worse would’ve killed him soon after.
It was the hardest thing I’d ever done when I walked away from the rodeo, from that sure promise of a successful career.
I’d made it. I was right there. But all the people Ty had hurt deserved to live their lives without a reminder of the night he held them at gunpoint because he was too high to realize what he was doing, and that was all I had become to them. A bad reminder.
So I walked away. My rodeo days were gone for good. Best in the nation? Didn’t matter. Ty had made sure of that. And then he’d gone and gotten himself shot.
Maybe he was better off. His good-natured personality would have been corrupted in prison. His spirit would have died. Was the death of a body better than the death of a soul?
I didn’t remember much about Lizzie’s mama, but I couldn’t stomach Lizzie getting lost in her memories like I had so many times. They would hurt her, and I didn’t want anything to hurt my girl.
It was stupid, but in my head, she was my girl. Had always been.
It didn’t matter that she looked like a drowned rat, with melted snowflakes dripping from the ends of her hair and her makeup running down her face. When she smiled at me, everything else fell away, the same way it had the night she sang to me.
Her voice now when she asked, “Your brother?” pulled me right out of my memories, good and bad.
I nodded.
“Your dad?”
I shook my head. “He’s gone too. Died not long after my brother.”
“I’m so sorry, Van.”
The nickname made me smile. No one else in the world had ever called me Van. Only Lizzie. It was our secret, just like Eli Winter had been mine these last six years.
Neither of us said a word for two whole minutes.
We just stared across the room at one another, but finally she broke the spell, and her pretty green eyes scanned the rest of the cabin’s main room.
They fixed on a photo I’d given to Doc Whitley the year after I’d met her at Manny’s.
It had been hanging over the fireplace in this cabin for five years, a little piece of me in her family’s home.
She must’ve recognized the meadow out back, when the wildflowers stood tall and swayed in the hot breeze of summer under a blazing sun.
We’d played in it countless times as kids, and it didn’t look much different now than it had back then.
I didn’t know how to tell her I’d taken that picture, or that I took it because it was our meadow, the same one we’d played Red Rover in. And I didn’t tell her I was sorry I hadn’t come clean six years ago or that I’d known who she was, so I said nothing.
When her eyes found mine again, she said, “It’s not very Christmassy in here.”
“Oh. Right. Um, I can cut down a tree if you want. Tomorrow.”
She laughed, a soft puff of her breath, and it sounded just as melodic as her singing voice as she pulled off her hat, yanked her hair up into a lumpy ponytail, and tied it with an elastic band she wore around her wrist. The ends stuck out in all kinds of crazy directions on the top of her head, and it was sexy how tendrils of it swept down her long neck.
I wanted to trace the line of it with my tongue.
“Just like that?” she asked. “You’ll just cut down a tree?”
“Sure.”
Something flashed in her eyes, another memory, but this one made her blush. “You’d do that for me? In this weather? Will it still be snowing tomorrow?”
“I’m not a future seer, but probably. I’m used to it. As long as it’s not whiteout conditions, I’ll get you that tree.”
“Maybe I could come with you?”
I couldn’t help the wince on my face at her question. I couldn’t picture Eli Winter trudging across a mountain through a blizzard.
“My grandparents probably left coats and boots and stuff up here. I’ll see if I can find them.”
It was romantic, the thought of us finding a tree together and cutting it down, but it was also ridiculous.
I decided just to get the tree without her knowing, and then she couldn’t argue with me.
Thinking about waiting on her as she dragged her feet through heavy snow gave me hives.
I’d be much quicker on my own, and if conditions were right, I’d take Doc Pepper.
He needed a good winter adventure. Since I brought him home from Vegas after my last ride, the most exercise he got was carrying my worthless ass to the stream down the way to take pictures.
He still hadn’t forgiven me for taking him away from all his friends and the excitement of roping competitions.
“Speakin’ of, we should probably call your grandparents, if we can get a line out, to let ’em know you arrived.”
She walked to the wall where the phone had been hung probably twenty years ago. She lifted the old push-button handpiece, but then turned and looked at me. “I don’t know anyone’s cell number. Not by heart, and my phone’s at the bottom of a mountain.”
“It was a deep gulley.” I pointed to the yellowed piece of cardstock pinned to the wall next to the phone. “Doc Whitley’s number’s on the wall.”
She checked the numbers on the paper. “That’s the office phone.
He might check his messages, but they were on their way to Costa Rica for Christmas.
My brother lives there.” She lifted the phone to her ear.
“If I absolutely had to, I could call my father, but it doesn’t really matter because there’s no dial tone. ”
“Lines must be out. I’ve got a satellite phone at my house.”
She laughed again. “You have a satellite phone? What are you, like, some mercenary or something?”
“Nope. Just a responsible adult who lives in this shit year in and year out, plus I do search and rescue up here when they need an extra body. We all have ’em.” I should’ve had mine with me tonight, but I left that part out.
“Okay. But I still don’t know the number.”
“Doc usually calls me from his office, but I think I have his direct number at home too. I’ll see if I can find it as soon as I get back there.
” I turned to head to the fireplace to stoke the fire I’d lit before I’d gone out to find her car dangling over the mountainside.
When I squatted down, she came and sat behind me on the old couch, tucking her legs underneath her, like she had in my truck.
“So then, what do I do now?”
Carefully, I stacked another log on the low-burning fire. “Whatcha mean?”
“I mean, like, there’s no phone, no internet, no TV.”
Smirking over my shoulder at her, I said, “Nice, ain’t it?”
She scoffed, but then smiled. “It’s weird. I live my whole life online.”
“Seems sad to me.”
“It is sad,” she said. “But still. I don’t know what to do with myself here.”
When I was done, I stood and brushed my hands on my jeans to knock loose the dirt and debris from the logs. “You hungry?”
A little light glinted in her eyes. “Starving. I’ve been eating road food for two days.” She made a face, scrunching up her nose and puckering her lips, and I chuckled at the little-girl look.
“I’ll heat up some chicken soup. I left some in the fridge earlier today.”
Shimmying her dainty shoulders and lifting them, she clasped her hands together. “That sounds perfect. Thank you.”
I got to work in the kitchen, and she sat at the table and watched me. I was glad I’d grabbed a loaf of bread when I’d stopped at the Food Mart yesterday. Soup without bread and butter to sop it up was disappointing.
“So, seriously, what’ve you been up to?” she asked. “I don’t really know anything about you.”
She was right, and I didn’t like that. “I’m a wildlife photographer.”
When she asked, “How’d you get into that?
” it didn’t sound like she was surprised.
I supposed she met a lot of photographers and artists in her line of work.
Why would my job be a surprise? But even though I knew who she had become to the world, I still thought of her as the unsure young woman she’d been that night at Manny’s, and I guess I’d figured that was how she’d remembered me too.
“Dunno,” I said. “It’s just always somethin’ I’ve done. My dad was an artist, so I used to go with him when he was lookin’ for somethin’ to carve. He made those statues. You know the ones you see on the side of the road, carved out of a tree trunk in the shape of a bear or an eagle or whatever?”
“Wow.”
“Nothin’ really ‘wow’ about it. I mean, yeah, it was a cool job, but it never paid much.
My mom was the one who worked and paid the bills.
She was a nurse. When she passed and my dad got old and couldn’t carve anything anymore, payin’ the bills became my responsibility.
And I had it figured out, but my brother—” I stopped at that.
I couldn’t bring myself to say it. After all these years, it was still hard to say out loud.
“Your brother got caught up in a life you don’t like to think about.”
Stirring the chicken soup heating on the stove, I half turned to look at her.
I was afraid of the pity I’d probably find on her face.
But still, I wanted to see her. I was desperate to know how she viewed that knowledge.
She remembered? Even though I’d never given any details about my brother’s misdeeds, Eli Winter remembered the conversation we’d had forever ago?
But when our eyes finally met, there was nothing on her face but compassion and acceptance.