Chapter 1 #2
I pedaled into the parking lot. I didn’t think I could ride my bike on the highway without getting caught, once everyone was out looking for me, and I had no idea where I was going. I wanted a map. And some of those fries that smelled so darn good.
But I didn’t get either. I came upon a small truck with a bed full of cargo entirely covered by a blue tarp. The truck had Texas plates. I was in Binghamton, New York. Texas seemed like it would be far enough.
It was dark, and the closest parking lot light was busted out.
So I got off my bike, rolled it closer, and took a look underneath the tarp.
Just boxes, mostly cardboard, some wooden, all sealed.
“Murray Sporting Goods” was stamped on some of them, and there was room in between.
Two men were walking out of the diner, heading for their rigs.
Another handful had just arrived, and the sound of big rig air brakes gusted as another one pulled in, his headlights spilling over me.
I crouched and pretended to fiddle with my bike chain until the parking lot was quiet again.
Then I picked up my bike and shoved it underneath the tarp.
I climbed in behind it, my heart pounding so hard I could hear it.
I pulled the tarp back down and found a more or less comfortable spot to curl up and wait, then tried to move some of the boxes in front of me in case the driver looked. I couldn’t hide the bike, though.
It didn’t take long before I heard the truck’s door open and felt it sink with the driver’s weight as he got in.
The door slammed, the engine cranked, and a few minutes later, the truck was pulling out onto the highway and picking up speed.
And I got my diary out of my backpack, so I could write all this down.
My life kind of ended tonight, I think.
Priscilla Marie Bishop is dead.
From now on I’m Cilla Travail, born in the back of a truck in Broome County, New York, fully grown at fourteen and three-quarters years old.
Wolf
Wolf sucked in a breath, looking up from the journal at his mother in the hospital bed. She’d slept through his entire evening visit this time, but now he had questions.
“Ma,” he said, leaning over the bed so his dark hair fell forward and touched her face. “I need you to wake up. Visiting hours are almost over.”
He’d been shocked to his bones—realizing that he’d never even known his mother’s real name.
Nor, apparently, his own.
“What the hell, Ma? What the hell?”
There came three gentle taps on the door. That was Kate, one of his mom’s nurses. She didn’t even bother sticking her head in anymore, just tapped three times to tell him time was up.
He closed his mother’s diary, straightened, and turned around to pick up his backpack from the reclining chair Nurse Mindy had brought in for him.
He’d come to believe over the past seventeen days that nurses were the best human beings on the planet.
He didn’t even mind that they made him leave when visiting hours ended every night.
He was pretty sure they enforced the rules more for his sake than theirs.
He glanced at the clock on the wall, a round black one with a white face. 8:57. His mother, or rather her diary, had just dropped the bombshell of a lifetime on him, and now there was a forced intermission before he could learn anything else—if there was even anything else in the diary to learn.
He leaned down to kiss her cheek, as he did every night.
His mom was pale. She’d always been pale, but now she was white and her face was thin and drawn. She was only forty-four, fourteen years older than he was. The cancer had aged her so much you’d never know.
He’d put a recent photo of her on the bulletin board—skin like Irish cream, freckles scattered across her nose and cheeks, orange-red curls framing her face.
Even her hair was losing its color. She was fading before his eyes like a watercolor in the rain.
And he’d never even known her real name.
He knew the rest—that she’d been a runaway teen when he was born, that she’d raised him with help from Grandma Sage.
It had been just the three of them for as long as he could remember, until Grandma had died in her sleep without warning or fuss twelve years ago, and just the two of them ever since.
“Priscilla Maria Bishop,” he whispered. And he covered her papery, frail hand with his brown one. “I love you, Ma.”
She didn’t respond. She’d been sleeping all afternoon. The nurses had warned him she’d start sleeping more, waking less, until eventually she wouldn’t wake at all.
Straightening, he slid the strap of his canvas bag up over his shoulder, tucked the diary inside, rubbed the small of his back with his free hand, and walked quietly out of the room. He waved to Mindy and Kate at the nurses’ desk, and they returned sad smiles that tried to convey comfort.
And then he headed out to his 1977 Ford truck. The front was still the original light blue, but it had faded to powder-with-rust. He turned the key to crank her up. She coughed a few times, but she started, and he patted the dash and said, “’Atta girl.”
Snowflakes filled his headlight beams all the way back to their simple house in Hobbsville, about fifteen miles north of Borger, Texas, almost to the Oklahoma panhandle. They got a few inches every winter, but it always came as a surprise all the same. It was only November.
His head was full of questions. If his mother’s name wasn’t Travail, then neither was his. Was he a Bishop, then?
What about her piece-of-shit stepfather? Was he still around?
He stepped through the front door and looked around the house they’d shared for more than a decade.
They’d moved around constantly when he was growing up, and he’d changed schools at least once a year.
But once he’d landed a job on a union construction crew, they’d been able to buy a place of their own, a fixer-upper.
His truck was a fixer-upper too.
Hell, so was his life.
He wanted answers. And pouring through his mother’s journals didn’t seem likely to give those answers fast enough. So he went to her bedroom.
When he opened the door, he realized he hadn’t been in there since the night he’d taken her to the ER. She hadn’t told him she was terminal. That job had fallen to a stranger, a doctor who knew more about his mother than he did.
It turned out keeping secrets had been a way of life for her, hadn’t it?
Her bed was unmade, just the way it had been when he’d scooped her out of it, taking the blanket with them, wrapping her up along the way to the truck. He looked around, wondering where her secrets might be hidden—besides the diaries, which would take days to read.
Not many options for hiding places in the bedroom.
It had been a den, but when she got too weak for the stairs, they’d made it her bedroom.
Then later, they’d added the hospital bed, and later the commode and the IV pole.
The whole time he’d been expecting her to recover, and wondering why it was taking so long.
He searched under the bed, inside the drawers of her dresser, the nightstand, and the closet.
He checked the insides and bottoms of drawers and under the mattress.
He felt for loose floorboards and false doors in the walls.
He was wondering whether to slice open the mattress when someone knocked at his front door.
The intrusion startled him. When someone came around unexpectedly, it made him nervous. He’d never thought too much about that, but now that he was questioning everything about himself, he realized he’d been raised to be suspicious of strangers by a woman who had something to hide.
Two women, as Grandma Sage had always been tight-lipped about her past as well. Now that he thought about it, she probably wasn’t related either.
What a trio they must’ve made, a green-eyed redhead, a black senior citizen, and a Native American kid without a clue.
He left the room, went to the door, opened it.
A woman stood there with a massive bundle of hair piled atop her lowered head in shades that shifted from caramel to blood-amber.
Snow was falling behind her as she lifted her head, but her eyes were slower and took their time sliding up his body.
By the time they locked onto his, her eyebrows were high.
“I…you…I…” She closed her lips, cleared her throat, but never let go of his eyes.
Hers were the darkest blue he’d ever seen. For a second, he forgot to breathe. Then she said his name and broke the spell. “I’m uh…looking for Wolf Travail.”
“Not looking for him, looking at him.”
“You’re…Cilla Travail’s son?”
“So I’ve been told.” He was proud of himself for not missing a beat.
“Yeah. Okay. So, I’m Camellia Rio and I—”
“Camellia Rio? Really?”
She crooked one eyebrow and her chin rose.
He saw he’d offended her and spoke fast. “Sounds too pretty to be a real name is all.”
“Like Wolf Travail, you mean?”
He had to lower his eyes fast. She was too quick for him, and he was sure it had flashed in his eyes—the knowledge that his name was made up. Probably. Not knowing was killing him.
“So full disclosure,” she said. “I work for a lawyer.”
“If it’s about the hospital bills, I—”
“No, not about the bills. I agreed to help your mother. She had a small life insurance policy and she left instructions for—listen, can I come in? It’s cold out here.”
He turned to look at the house behind him. His mom’s bedroom door was open, the mess he’d made going through her things fully visible. When he looked back at Camellia Rio, her blue eyes told him she’d already seen it. Snowflakes were gathering atop her mountain of hair. He sighed in surrender.
“Yeah, sure, come on in.”
Willow Brand, Sky Dancer Ranch, Quinn, Texas
At the family meeting she’d called, Willow yanked the sheet off the cradle in the middle of her mom’s living room.
The one with the name “WOLF” carved into it.
She’d found it in the attic while her folks had been traveling, and she’d kept it to herself for as long as she could stand.
Her anger had only grown. So she whipped off the sheet and let it sail to the floor in the corner with all due dramatic flair.
There was a collective gasp and Willow said, “What is this, Mom?”
Beside her, Jeremiah tightened his arm around her shoulders and whispered, “I thought you were gonna ease into it, babe.”
She ignored him and continued. “We were looking in the attic for my old cradle for Lily and Ethan’s baby, and we found this. What does this mean? Who’s Wolf?”
Taylor, her mother, did not speak. She had gone still, staring at the cradle, her long black hair, streaked in silver, formed a smooth curtain over her face. But then she looked up and her brown eyes shifted to Willow, who was her younger mirror in every way.
“I—” Her beautiful face crumpled and she ran from the room with Willow’s father, Wes, right on her heels.
“What the hell is going on?” Willow called after her parents as they ran outdoors, leaving the rest of the whole dang clan behind them.
A heavy hand fell on her shoulder—Uncle Garrett’s hand.
“I s’pose this talk is overdue.” Then he looked around the room at the gathered Brands.
All of the elders, their wives too, except Wes and Taylor.
Aunt Chelsea was walking around with a pot, refilling coffee mugs.
Willow’s cousin and best friend Ethan moved closer to her side while his beautiful Lily’s blue eyes beamed with concern, her hand resting atop her swollen belly.
Maria-Michelle and her new husband, Harrison, drew nearer.
Cousins Trevor and Orrin leaned on either end of the mantel like opposite bookends, one as dark as the other was light, and Orrin’s kid sister, Drew, blond and blue-eyed like her brother, sat on the hearthstone.
Except for his black-framed eyeglasses and bigger build, Baxter could’ve been their older brother, with his shaggy golden mane.
As Willow looked from the stunned faces of the younger Brands to the expressions of their parents, resolved and expectant, it was clear most of the elders already knew whatever it was Uncle Garrett was about to say.
Uncle Ben and Aunt Penny were not holding her gaze, but averting theirs whenever she looked their way.
Garrett moved to the center of the room and took a breath. Aunt Chelsea met his eyes and nodded, and he seemed to take courage from it. “Willow, sweetie, you were not your parents’ firstborn child,” he began.
Every one of Willow’s cousins sent a wide-eyed look her way. And then Uncle Garrett told the story.