Chapter 37
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Wyatt
The relief I feel hitting the dirt track home is almost overwhelming.
Despite the high I’m riding from proposing to Emily last night and cementing her as my entire future, I’m paying the steep price for our champagne and whiskey-fueled celebration.
My head is throbbing, my eyes feel like they’ve been scrubbed with sandpaper, and all I want is to haul her into my arms and sleep for a week.
I’m halfway down the dirt track when the silence of the afternoon is shattered. Two fire engines roar past me, their sirens screaming and dust billowing behind them in a thick, suffocating cloud. My stomach drops with a heavy weight settling in my gut.
I don’t even think. I floor the truck, following the engines as they swerve toward the south side of the property. The smoke is visible now, a massive, oily black column that’s staining the horizon.
“Please, no,” I mutter, my grip tightening on the steering wheel until my knuckles are white. “Not the barn. Not today.”
Something from the wedding has sparked a damn fire.
I skid to a halt behind the engines, the smell of burning timber hitting me before I even open the door. The scene is pure chaos. Ranch hands are scurrying, sirens are wailing, and the heat coming off the barn is so intense I can feel it through the windshield.
I jump out of the truck, my boots hitting the dirt hard.
“What the fuck is happening?!” I roar, looking for Dayton or anyone who can tell me the barn was empty.
Dayton turns, his face streaked with soot and sweat. He looks like he’s seen a ghost. “Wyatt—she’s in there.”
The world slows down. The sound of the fire fades into a distant static, replaced by the thundering of my own heart.
“Who?” I growl, grabbing the front of his shirt. “Who is in there, Dayton?”
“Emily…and Alex,” he gasps, his voice shaking. “We didn’t know the boy was in there…she came flying down from the house like a bat out of hell and ran straight into the smoke. We tried to catch her, Wyatt. We couldn’t stop her.”
I let go of him, my legs feeling like they’re made of lead. The barn is a furnace. The rafters are starting to buckle, and the flames are licking at the very top of the roof.
“Alex,” I whisper, his name catching in my throat. “My son! My son and my fiancée are in there!”
The heat is blistering even from here, but I don’t care. I’m about to dive headlong into that furnace when a pair of heavy, gloved arms wrap around my chest and yank me back. I recognize Mike instantly. The best friend I went to school with is the only thing standing between the flames and me.
“Wyatt, you can’t go in there, man! The whole structure is about to collapse!” Mike bellows over the roar of the fire.
“If you think I’m going to stand here and watch the people I love burn to death for a second time, you’re out of your goddamn mind!” I roar, thrashing against him. I don’t care about the risks. I lost my past, but I am not losing my future.
“Wyatt, stop! We’ve got a crew going in! I’ll find them!”
I’m about to rip his head off, muscles straining, feeling like they could snap, when the barn door at the other side flies open. A massive, violent billow of black smoke pours out, and I break free of his grip.
I’m running before I can even process what I’m seeing.
Suddenly, my son comes flying out of the darkness. He’s small, shivering, and his face is wrapped in a thick sweater that I recognize instantly. It’s mine.
“Alex! Alex!” I drop to my knees, grabbing him as he hits the grass.
“Daddy,” he gasps, his face streaked with soot, falling into a fit of ragged coughing.
“Alex, you’re okay. I’m here, I’m here. Where’s Emily? Alex, where is she?!”
I look up, and the sight that meets me will haunt me for the rest of my life. Emily stumbles out of the smoke like a ghost. Her skin is pale beneath the grime, her eyes glassy and unfocused. I can see the exact moment her strength fails, the exact moment she decides she’s done everything she can.
The paramedics approach as I scramble to my feet, run to her, and catch her as her knees buckle. She’s a dead weight in my arms, her head falling forward against my shoulder. She’s barely breathing, her chest hitching in shallow, desperate rattles.
“Help! Somebody help!” I scream, my voice breaking.
I pull her close, my face pressed against her soot-covered hair, ignoring the sirens and the shouting and the crashing timber behind us. I’ve got her. I’ve got them both. But as I look down at her still, quiet face, the terror in my chest is louder than the fire.
The paramedics are there in seconds, my dad right on their heels. Alex is sitting up, his small lungs fighting for air, but I’m still on the ground, holding my whole heart in my arms and watching her slip away before my eyes.
“Dad!” I shout, the word coming out as a strangled sob. The tears are streaming down my face now, carving tracks through the dirt.
In an instant, the paramedics have an oxygen mask over Emily’s face. They take her from my arms, and the loss of her weight makes me feel like I’m about to float off the earth.
I’m torn in half. My son is in the arms of my father, sobbing uncontrollably. My fiancée is on the grass, lifeless and being worked on by strangers. The world is spinning, my ears are ringing with a high-pitched whine that drowns out the sirens.
“She’s breathing, but we need to move her quickly!” a medic yells over the roar of the fire behind us.
Everything is moving in slow motion. My heart is beating so hard against my ribs it hurts.
“Go with her, Wyatt,” my dad yells frantically. “I’ve got Alex. He’s in better shape than she is. Go!”
My head whips in his direction, and I assess the scene through the haze of my own panic. Alex is sitting up. He’s coughing, but he’s talking. He’s conscious. I scramble over to him and press a hard, desperate kiss to his forehead. My precious boy.
“Daddy.” He coughs, his small arms wrapping around my neck with a strength that surprises me. “You have to go make sure Emily’s okay. I don’t want her to die.”
That’s it. That’s the sound of my soul breaking wide open.
“She isn’t going anywhere, Alex. I promise,” I rasp, though I have no right to make promises like that.
I draw him in right before pulling away, look at my dad once with a silent plea for him to keep my son safe, and then I’m on my feet. I’m running toward the ambulance where they’re loading Emily’s stretcher. I’m not leaving her side. Not even for a second.
I’m shoved briskly into the jump seat, my knees nearly touching the stretcher where Emily lies.
I can’t believe this is happening again.
The ghosts of my past are screaming in my ears, mocking me.
For the second time in my life, I’m forced to sit and watch a woman in my life slip away into the gray.
“Starting high-flow oxygen,” the medic grunts, adjusting the mask over her face.
I watch the plastic bag beneath her chin. It should inflate with every breath, but her intake is so shallow and useless that it barely moves.
One medic is already spiking a bag of saline, hanging it from the ceiling hook to start an IV.
“We need to cool the burn sites and keep her hydrated,” he mutters more to himself than me.
The moment he jabs the needle into her arm, I wince. Watching them work on her like this makes a roll of uncontrollable nausea coil through me.
I can’t understand most of what he’s saying to me, but they are worried about her airway.
I watch in horror as they pull out a flashlight, checking her throat for swelling.
He tells me that if her throat closes from the heat, they’ll have to intubate her right here on the move.
Every time she lets out a wet, rattling cough, the medic winces.
“Lungs are sounding crackly. We’ve got significant soot in the sputum,” he calls out to his partner in the front.
Then they start cutting. The scissors snip through the T-shirt—my T-shirt—exposing the angry, red welts on her shoulders and arms. He immediately covers the areas with water-soaked dressings. It’s a race against her own body temperature.
“Stay with me, Em,” I whisper, reaching out to grab her hand. It’s limp, her fingernails stained black with the soot of the barn. “Don’t you dare leave me. Alex is waiting. I’m waiting.”
The monitor above her head chirps with a frantic, high-pitched rhythm.
Her heart is racing, trying to compensate for the lack of oxygen in her blood.
Every beep feels like a hammer against my skull.
The ambulance swerves, throwing me against the wall, but I don’t let go of her hand.
I can’t. I feel like if I let go, she’ll float away into the smoke, and I’ll never find her again.
“Keep her steady!” the medic yells as he checks her pulse. “Saturation is dropping. Crank the O2!”
I’ve never felt more useless in my entire life. I’m supposed to fix things, but I can’t fix the air in her lungs. I can only sit here in the back of this shaking metal box and pray to a God I haven’t spoken to in years to let her breathe.
The ambulance doors fly open before the vehicle has even fully stopped shaking.
The sound of the sirens is replaced by a chaotic composition of shouting voices and the frantic clatter of a gurney hitting the pavement.
A crash team of doctors and nurses in pale blue scrubs swarms the back of the ambulance, their faces grim, filling me with dread.
I’m forced to stumble out of the way as they haul Emily out, the medic shouting a string of numbers and vitals.
“Oxygen saturation dropping, heart rate 140, second degree burns to the upper extremities!”
Over the roar of the idling engine. I try to keep up, my hand reaching out to touch the railing of her stretcher one last time, but the flurry of the emergency room takes over.
We hit the double doors of the Emergency Department, and for a split second, the fluorescent lights hurt the back of my eyes, making my head spin.
Before I can take another step, a nurse places a firm hand on my chest, stopping me at the threshold of the trauma bay.
I watch through the glass as they surround her, a blur of stethoscopes and medical instruments, until a curtain is yanked shut, cutting her off from me and leaving me standing in the hall with nothing but her soot on my skin.
I’m suddenly consumed by a wave of grief that’s way too fucking familiar.
She has to make it.