Prologue
Waylon
THIRTEEN YEARS AGO
Acrashing sound in the distance wakes me up from a dead-ass sleep and the throbbing between my temples makes me wonder if it wasn’t my head that woke me. I squint across the room, trying to make out if my twin brother is in his bed or not.
Yep, even at nineteen years old, we still share a room in our parents’ house.
Luckily, it’s spacious, so we still have our areas, but that’s what happens when you have a larger family. At least when we outgrew the bunk beds at age nine, our parents got us full-sized ones.
Leaning over toward my nightstand, I turn on my lamp and notice his covers are pulled back.
We went out last night and came home together, so he’s got to be around here somewhere.
There’s no way he’d drive after how much he drank, but it wouldn’t be unlike Wilder to wander downstairs or even outside if he couldn’t sleep.
Our family’s ranch sits on a couple hundred acres fifteen minutes outside of Sugarland Creek. It’s a Southern small town of only two thousand people. Most of them have been here all their lives—like me and my four siblings.
Half of the ranch is used for our equine retreat business.
Five cabins sit along the bottom of the mountain for guests to rent out, and then we offer horseback riding, swimming, fishing, hiking, and a handful of other activities.
Wilder and I spend a lot of time together since we manage the trail horses and guide the guests on horseback rides.
The other half consists of the family’s personal and boarded horses as well as the stud farm.
My younger siblings work there mostly between their school schedules, weekends, and over the summer.
It’s all we’ve ever known, but we love it nonetheless.
Growing up in East Tennessee provides great weather and amazing views. I can’t imagine living anywhere else.
Since the clock reads four o’clock in the morning, I contemplate going back to bed, but the nagging feeling in my gut has me walking out of our room in search of my brother.
We’ve had this twin intuition for as long as I can remember and mine is currently on high alert.
A feeling of…dread, almost, and waves of sadness consume me.
Whether it’s from being half asleep or something to do with Wilder, I need to find out.
The rest of the house is eerily quiet. My dad’s alarm goes off at five.
Ranch chores don’t stop on the weekends, so we’ll be expected to be up and ready for work by six.
My mom loves to cook and makes everyone breakfast before we head out, so the house will be brightly lit and loud within the next hour.
It’s the worst after going out all night, but that’s the price we pay for having a social life.
I could do without the partying, but I don’t like leaving Wilder.
He loves to have a good time and can be a handful, so I prefer to be with him to make sure he’s safe and gets back home.
Even though we’re not legally allowed to drink, that’s never stopped anyone in this small town—barn, field, or house parties.
We’ve been to them all. Sometimes in one night.
As I walk down the hallway, I notice the bathroom door is ajar and the motion night light is on, so someone must be inside.
Not wanting to walk in on Wilder doing his business, I knock softly.
“Hey, you okay?”
I’m not sure how long he’s been in there, but when he doesn’t respond, I push open the door to peek inside.
I chuckle under my breath at his drunk ass passed out on the bathroom floor in only his boxers. Couldn’t even make it back to bed after he took a piss. Typical.
Kicking his arm with my foot, I say, “Dude, get up. Dad and Mom will kill you if they find you like this.”
He doesn’t so much as grunt when I kick him a second time, even harder.
After several seconds of no movement, my heartbeat ticks faster in my neck. Something feels wrong.
“Wilder? Get up, man.”
Moving around him, my bare foot steps in something wet.
I lift it and try to shake it off. “Jesus Christ, did you pee on the floor?”
Again, no reaction from him.
“Okay, time to wakey-wakey, bro.”
This time I flick on the light and the room bathes in brightness. This should get his attention.
“I swear to God, I ain’t carryin’ your drunk ass—”
When my eyes adjust to the light, I realize it’s not piss on the floor.
It’s blood.
“Holy shit…” Kneeling next to him, I quickly glance around his body, checking for a wound before I notice his black boxer shorts are soaked.
The blood is coming from his thigh.
“No, no, no…” I murmur, grabbing the hand towel nearby and adding pressure to the thigh with horizontal razor cuts. “I think you nicked an artery. Fuck.”
There’s no telling how long he’s been unconscious or bleeding out, but the fetal position he’s in probably helped him not to bleed out faster.
I check for a pulse. It’s faint, but it’s there.
Then I listen to his shallow breathing.
Since I don’t have my phone on me and I’m too scared to leave him or remove my hands, I shout for help instead. Even though everyone sleeps like the dead around here, one of them should hear me.
“Help! Someone wake up! We need help in here!”
By the third time, my mother rushes in and her face pales the moment she realizes what’s happened.
“Oh my—”
“Call 911, now!” I cut off her words and she scrambles back to her bedroom.
“How long has he been bleedin’ out?” Dad asks, rushing next to me.
“I dunno. I found him a few minutes ago. He’s still breathin’, but he won’t wake up.”
Dad props Wilder’s head in his lap to clear his airway, then feels his pulse. “He probably passed out right before you got here.”
“What’s goin’ on?”
My younger brothers, Landen and Tripp, stand in the doorway. I give a quick recap so we don’t waste any more time.
“He doesn’t need CPR?” Landen asks.
Dad leans down above his mouth and shakes his head. “Still breathin’.”
“Barely,” I add.
Landen took a lifeguard course and first aid classes last summer when he was sixteen and then taught us what to do in case of an emergency.
Mom returns with the phone to her ear, speaking to an operator, and then kneels next to me to grab Wilder’s hand.
“They’re on their way,” Mom chokes out.
Dad orders Landen and Tripp to get dressed and unlock the front door for the EMTs. My little sister, Noah, wakes up shortly after and panics.
“Wilder!” she shouts, shaking his arm.
“He’s gonna be okay,” I tell her but also because I need to hear it myself.
“He’s lost too much blood. He’ll probably need a blood transfusion,” Dad explains.
Sadly, it wouldn’t be his first one. Or his second.
When we were fifteen, he accidentally sliced his leg open from a sharp metal piece on a fence. He didn’t realize how bad it was and continued working. The blood gushed down his leg and pooled in his boot. I found him unconscious in the barn and Dad rushed him to the hospital.
By the time we got him there, they were throwing around words like sepsis, infection, and blood transfusions. He was fucking lucky I found him when I did.
The second time was self-inflicted a year later.
We were sixteen, and I found him in the bathtub.
There was so much blood in the water, I couldn’t see where the injury was at first. The opposite thigh from the fence accident was covered in little cuts. But it was the vertical one that did the most damage.
It was the first time I saw my father cry—from anger and fear.
It felt like a part of me was dying, and I couldn’t understand why he’d done it. And now again. I wish I could take away his pain.
My brother—the class clown since the day we started kindergarten, the loud and obnoxious one always up for a party, the most rambunctious person I knew—was hurting himself.
It didn’t make any sense.
Wilder has no danger-o-meter. He’s a risk-taker to his core.
The adrenaline rush he gets fuels years of antics that have led to him getting injured numerous times.
The time he invented Barn Roof Trampoline tournaments and did a cannonball off the roof.
Instead of landing on his feet, he bounced and flew right into a tree. He got a concussion and a broken rib.
You’d think that would’ve slowed him down, but a month later, we went to Blackhole Granite to swim in the quarry.
He had a little bit too much to drink and when he jumped in from the twenty-foot cliff, he didn’t swim back up.
Landen and Tripp rushed in and pulled him out.
I gave him CPR until he finally coughed up water.
It’s almost like he doesn’t care about the risks and there’s a small part of me that wonders if he does it on purpose.
After the first time he cut his inner thigh, our parents made him see a therapist and psychiatrist to properly diagnose him.
He promised he wasn’t doing it because he wanted to die.
Rather, he just wanted to numb the pain.
Dull the sadness that overtook his mind sometimes.
Feel relief from the overwhelming emotions he didn’t know how to handle.
I suspect that’s why he drinks until he blacks out, too.
Still, they took him twice a month until he turned eighteen and then Wilder was old enough to make the decision not to go anymore.
I wish he had continued.
The depression he was trying so desperately to cover up suffocated me more than he’d ever realized.
I felt those feelings too, but I never put a label on it.
I thought it was my own sadness consuming me, and maybe part of it is or maybe it’s something we share as twins, but I couldn’t comprehend how he felt it so deeply that he had to find ways to numb it. Ways to live around it.
Perhaps he felt mine too and the weight of each other’s feelings was too heavy for one person.
I wish I could turn them off, take them away from him, and be the one who suffered for both of us. I hate that I can’t.