Chapter 24
Chapter Twenty-Four
Chesney
An unsettling sense of dread sits heavy in my stomach at the sound of the doorbell. My eyes slide over to the clock on the wall. Nine-fifteen. I should already be at Wind River by now, but this visit felt like something I shouldn’t miss.
The house is quiet. Too quiet.
It feels like an omen.
Nobody says the word out loud, but they don’t have to.
It’s written across the cardboard boxes the nurse carries into the house.
The oxygen equipment. The medication kit.
The hospital bed being delivered this afternoon.
Hospice. The word somehow feels heavier than cancer ever did.
Cancer still carries the illusion of a fight, a possibility.
Hospice sounds like surrender, like there’s no denying it anymore.
I stand in the kitchen, pretending to be occupied, while strangers quietly rearrange my childhood home around the fact that my father is dying. It doesn’t feel real. It should, given we knew this was coming, but it doesn’t. Maybe because I spent so many years avoiding this place. Avoiding him.
By the time I made it back to town the other day, Dad had taken a turn for the worst.
“You should go sit with him.” Truett’s voice is gentle beside me. I don’t move. Nor do I say anything. “He asked for you.”
My chest squeezes. It steals my breath away.
I glance at my brother, holding his gaze for a long moment before finally pushing off the counter.
My stomach is in knots the entire way down the hallway.
The den is dimly lit when I walk inside.
The air in here feels thinner, smelling faintly of antiseptic, medicine, and clean sheets.
Things sick people shouldn’t have to get used to.
Dad’s propped against a mountain of pillows. He’s awake, but barely, staring out the window toward the pasture. When he hears me approach, he turns his head and looks at me. “You look like shit,” he says.
A laugh slips out before I can stop it. Even riddled with cancer, the man’s still as blunt as they come. “So do you, old man.”
His smile is tired. So are his eyes. Everything about him is tired now. So different from the man I ran away from when I was sixteen. The one who looked at me like he hated me, when he could stand to look at me at all.
I pull a chair closer to the bed and sit, suddenly unsure what to do with my hands or where to look.
For a while, we don’t say anything. It’s like we’re both sorting through decades’ worth of words neither of us has ever voiced.
The silence is loud and uncomfortable. I don’t know what I’m supposed to be doing, or what I should be saying.
Truett is a pro at this stuff. Talking to dad has always come easily to him, even when they didn’t always get along.
He’s also a lot better at the heavy stuff—the doctors visits, the test results, the daily care my father now requires—but I know that comes from having nobody to lean on.
Because I left and never looked back. Truett had to learn how to do all of this because I wasn’t here.
It’s something I never really thought about.
I made my decision to leave years ago, and nothing was going to break me back.
Looking back now, I know it was selfish. It was unfair to put all of this on my brother. I let my pride and my anger and my trauma get in the way of helping the one person in this family who has never once looked at me differently. Never once looked at me like Lyle’s death was my fault.
Finally, my dad clears his throat. “Truett told me… He told me the cabins are finished.” There isn’t an ounce of anger in those words this time.
My chest tightens. “They are.”
“You built a website.” He doesn’t say it like a question. It takes me aback.
“How do you know that?”
He shrugs. “Truett can really talk when he gets going.”
That almost makes me smile. I don’t know why it never occurred to me that Truett would talk about me to our dad. That he’d keep him updated on the Wind River situation. Probably because I assumed our father wouldn’t give a shit.
“We’ll be opening soon,” I say cautiously.
He nods slowly. “Good.” His eyes drift back toward the window, and for a minute, he’s quiet. But I can tell he’s not finished. “I always figured your brother would stay.”
The words settle heavily between us.
I clench my jaw and tighten my grip on the arms of the chair.
“But you…” Dad looks at me. “Well, I knew you had no plans of coming back here.”
My mouth dries. I don’t know what to say to that because he’s not wrong.
Even before the accident, I hated this place.
I hated all the gossip, the nosy eyes that were always watching, the feud—mostly the feud—and how deep down, I always knew that what I wanted could never happen because of it.
The generational divide between my family and Jasper’s has affected so much of my life.
It dictated so much of it. And now, knowing how the whole thing started, I’m even angrier about it.
Leaving Sweet Briar was one of the best things I could’ve done for myself.
Living somewhere where my last name didn’t hold weight, getting to figure out who I was and what I wanted without my family staring over my shoulder, the garage…
I needed that. I needed a life that wasn’t measured by cattle prices and rainfall.
A life where I didn’t have to live in fear that my family would realize what a traitor I was for falling in love with the enemy.
“I interrupted all of that,” Dad says, catching me off guard. It feels like he read my mind.
“What?”
“You coming home.” His voice is getting rougher the longer he speaks. “I know part of it is the situation will the Smith boy. But this isn’t what you wanted. I know it wasn’t your plan.”
My throat tightens. “Dad—”
“It interrupted your life. I interrupted your life.” The guilt in his eyes cuts into me like a knife to the chest. It takes a second, but eventually it hits me—he’s apologizing.
In his own, fucked up way, my father is apologizing.
And all I can think about is every angry word between us.
Every holiday I skipped. Every call I ignored. Every excuse I made not to come home.
“I would’ve come.” The words leave my mouth before I can think about them.
“I know.”
“No.” Shaking my head, I say, “I mean it. And I should’ve come sooner.”
Dad studies me for a while, and I fight the urge to squirm in my chair. “I spent a lot of years thinking you hated me.”
The honesty knocks the air out of me, and I look away. I did hate him… Didn’t I? But the answer isn’t that simple. Maybe I did. Or maybe I hated how he wasn’t there for me after Lyle died. How he never, not even once, tried to support or guide me through my grief the way a parent should.
“I was angry,” I say. My voice shakes, the admission barely above a whisper.
“So was I.” When I look up, my dad’s already looking at me. “But I shouldn’t have let it stay that way.”
My throat is thick. It feels like years and years of hurt and anger are boiling inside of me.
This is a conversation we should’ve had a long time ago.
It’s one I purposely avoided, and I know he did too.
But maybe this is our chance to have it now.
Maybe this is my chance to get it all off my chest, so he can finally know how I felt and why I stayed away as long as I did.
But before I can say anything, I hesitate.
In the back of my mind, I wonder if now might not be the best time. If now is too late.
Should I make peace with it within myself? He’s a dying man, so maybe I’m just supposed to tell him I forgive him and let that be it.
My stomach twists. I could do that. I could put it all behind me…
but I don’t want to do that. I know I’d regret it if I never got a chance to tell him how I feel.
Not only that, but I don’t think my dad would believe me, even if I did tell him I forgive him.
I think there’s a part of him that knows this can’t be swept under the rug.
A part of him that knows it’s time. And I think that’s probably why he wanted me to come here instead of Truett.
“No, you shouldn’t,” I say, my voice shaky.
“Lyle’s death was hard on all of us. It ripped our family apart.
You lost a son, and I can’t even begin to imagine what that was like.
But I lost someone too, Dad. I lost my brother.
It was the worst pain I’ve ever experienced in my life, and to this day, still is.
I was sixteen, and I didn’t know how to process what happened.
I didn’t know how not to live with the constant, crippling pain.
I needed my parents back then—I needed my dad, but you weren’t there. ”
Pressure builds behind my eyes, and there’s a dull ache inside my heart as I relive all this. And I can tell he is too. His eyes are red-rimmed, and his jaw is clenched tight.
“Everything got so ugly after the accident.” I continue.
“Mom couldn’t get out of bed, you buried yourself in work, and I was riddled with guilt and self-loathing.
I hated myself. It felt like, somewhere in the middle of all that, we stopped being father and son.
Like a switch flipped almost immediately, and we became two people living in the same house, orbiting the same grief without ever touching it. You couldn’t even look at me most days.
“Then when I moved to live with Grandma and Grandpa, you never reached out. You never checked on me. I know I didn’t reach out either, and looking back, maybe I should have.
But I’m your child, Dad. You should’ve checked on me.
You should’ve made sure I was okay or, at the very least, made sure I had the resources to be okay eventually.
If it weren’t for Grandma’s insistence that I speak to a professional, I never would’ve gone. ”
My cheeks are wet, and my voice keeps cracking. I’ve opened the floodgates, and now, I don’t know how to close them.