Chapter 46
CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
The fairgrounds smelled like dirt and animals and funnel cake, and I was twelve years old.
Not literally. I knew where I was—Meagher County, Montana, August, thirty-four years old and standin' on solid ground with Sassy's arm looped through mine.
I knew the difference between then and now.
I knew this wasn't the circuit, wasn't a dusty rodeo lot in some town I'd forget by Tuesday, wasn't the particular brand of chaos that came with followin' a man who loved bulls more than his daughter.
But my body didn't know that. My body smelled the livestock and the hot grease and the cocktail of dust and leather and sun-baked metal, and it decided we were twelve.
I focused on breathing. In through the nose. Out through the mouth. The way I'd taught myself during the years when panic was a luxury I couldn't afford—you didn't get to fall apart when nobody was coming to pick you up.
"—haven't even told Rhett yet. It's only one semester, but I just know he's gonna make it a whole thing, and I can't deal with that right now. Bozeman isn't even that far, it's like—Calvin? Calvin. You listenin'?"
"Mhm."
I wasn't. Something about Bozeman and Rhett and not telling him—I caught the tail end but couldn't make the pieces fit, not with the noise in my own head drowning everything else out.
Sassy tugged my arm, steering us through the crowd toward the main arena fence.
The bleachers were filling up—families, ranchers, the usual collection of sun-weathered locals who turned out for anything that qualified as entertainment in a county where the population barely cracked four thousand.
I scanned every face without meaning to.
A reflex. Sixteen years of walking into rooms and clocking exits and identifying threats before they identified me.
I didn't see Denny. Didn't see Wyatt.
The knot between my shoulder blades loosened a fraction.
"Here." Sassy pulled us to a spot at the arena fence, front row, good sightline. She released my arm and planted her hands on the top rail, bouncing on her toes. "God, I love rodeo day. Is that weird? It's totally weird."
"Not weird." I gripped the fence rail. The metal was sun-hot under my palms.
"You okay?" She turned those sharp green eyes on me.
Sassy wasn't stupid. She didn't know the details—didn't know about Wyatt, didn't know about the years I'd spent running—but she'd been watching me all morning with the quiet attention of a woman who knew what not-okay looked like, even when the person wearing it was doin' their best to hide it.
"I'm good."
She studied me a beat longer than comfortable. "Okay. But if you need to bail, we bail. No questions."
I nodded. Didn't trust my voice with anything more.
The speakers crackled. The first team roping pair was announced.
Two guys I didn't recognize backed their horses into the boxes, and the crowd settled into that anticipatory hush that came right before the chute opened.
I'd heard it a thousand times growing up.
The sound of a held breath—an entire arena full of people waiting for the same five seconds.
The chute banged. The steer broke. The horses lunged. Ropes flew.
My chest tightened, but I held.
The second team ran. Another clean run, decent time.
Brody and Rhett were third.
I watched Brody walk Speed toward the staging area, moving easy in the saddle, hat sitting just right on top of his perfect head, rope coiled at his side.
He looked good up there—confident, loose, comfortable in his body in a way that I envied on my best days.
Speed was alert beneath him, ears pricked, that coiled energy I'd come to recognize as a horse getting ready to do what it was born to do.
From across the arena, I caught a flash of movement in the bleachers. Two figures in the front row—one stooped, one solid. I squinted against the sun.
Granddad.
My breath caught. He was sitting next to Hank, both of them planted like fence posts, arms crossed, focused on the arena. Granddad was leaning forward slightly, like he was trying to get a better angle on the chutes.
Hank must've picked him up from the facility and driven him out here. Two ornery old bastards, side by side at the Meagher County rodeo, like they'd been doin' it for fifty years.
He'd had people. Maybe not family, but someone. For exactly three seconds, I forgot to be afraid.
Then I saw Denny.
He was standing near the stock pens behind the chutes—hat off, leaning against a fence panel, talkin' to a couple cowboys.
Animated. Hands moving. Laughing at his own joke the way he always did. Entirely in his element, because the rodeo was the only place my daddy had ever felt at home.
My eyes tracked left. Automatic. Instinct honed over years of knowing that wherever Denny was, Wyatt wasn't far.
I found him.
Wyatt was behind the chutes.
Not in the staging area where the ropers and their horses waited. Behind it. In the narrow corridor between the back of the boxes and the stock pens—a service area, maintenance access, the kind of space that was technically off-limits to anyone who wasn't working the gates.
He was moving along the back of the boxes. Slow. Unhurried. His hat was pulled low and he had his hands in his pockets, and to anyone glancing that way he probably looked like another cowboy who'd wandered somewhere he shouldn't be.
But he wasn't wandering. His trajectory was specific. Deliberate.
He crept toward the header's box.
Brody's box.
Where Speed was backed in, shifting his feet, coiling up.
My fingers tightened on the fence rail.
"Sassy."
"Hmm?"
"Who's allowed behind the chutes?"
She glanced over. "Gate crew, stock handlers, the vet. Why?"
I didn't answer. My eyes were locked on Wyatt. He'd stopped—just behind the back wall of the header's box. Not visible from inside. Not visible from the arena. Hidden in that narrow gap where the metal panels met, close enough to touch the fencing if he reached out.
Close enough that a horse could sense him. Smell him. Hear him.
A chill started at the base of my skull and flooded downward, filling my chest, my stomach, my legs. Not panic. Older than panic. The deep, animal knowledge that something terrible was about to happen and I was too far away to stop it.
Wyatt's hand came out of his pocket.
I opened my mouth—
The chute banged open.
The steer broke.
Speed lunged—and then didn't. His body torqued sideways, a violent full-body flinch, and I saw Brody's weight shift wrong, saw his left foot lose the stirrup and the exact moment the saddle stopped being underneath him.
The barrier snapped. Speed lurched forward on instinct—chasing the steer because that's what he was trained to do—and Brody went ass over tea kettle, his body ragdolling through the air for one horrible, suspended second before the ground caught him.
The sound of him hitting the ground carried across the arena. A dull, heavy thud that I felt in my teeth.
The crowd gasped. One collective intake of breath from two hundred people.
I barely heard it.
I was twelve years old.
I was standing in the center of a paddock and the dust was hanging in the air and my mama's body was on the ground and her neck was wrong—bent at an angle that necks don't bend—and the horse was screaming, a sound I would hear in my sleep for the next twenty-two years, and I couldn't move.
My feet were rooted to the dirt and my mouth was open but nothing was coming out and the world had gone silent except for that horse and the buzzing of a single fly that landed on my mama's hand while she lay there not moving, not breathing, not anything anymore.
"Calvin!"
Sassy's hand clamped around my bicep.
Air slammed back into my lungs.
The arena dirt was settling around Brody's body.
He was on his back. Not moving. Speed had bolted, the riderless horse cantering toward the far end of the arena while two pickup riders gave chase.
Rhett was already off Duke and running. The crowd had gone from a gasp to a murmur—an entire group of people deciding whether they'd just witnessed something bad or something worse.
I was off the fence before I knew I was moving—over it, not through it.
My boots hit the arena dirt on the other side while Sassy shouted something behind me that I didn't catch and didn't care about.
The distance between the fence and where he lay was maybe forty yards and I covered it at a dead sprint, boots pounding packed earth, dust kicking up behind me.
Rhett was already kneeling beside him when I slid to a stop and dropped to my knees in the dirt.
Brody's eyes were closed. His hat was five feet away, upside down.
Dirt in his hair, on his face, in the creases of his neck.
His chest was rising and falling—I could see it, could count it—but his eyes were still closed.
My mama's eyes never opened again.
I needed his eyes to open.
"Brody." My voice came out wrecked. I didn't recognize it. "Brody, open your eyes."
Rhett had two fingers against the side of Brody's neck. His face was controlled—all business, all foreman—but his other hand was gripping Brody's hand hard enough to blanch his own knuckles.
"Don't move him," Rhett said.
"Brody." I put a gentle hand on his chest. Felt his heartbeat under my palm. Rapid but steady. "Open your eyes, boy scout. Right now."
Tears ran down my cheeks, and when he didn't respond, I laid my forehead on the back of my hand and the sob that ripped through me was inhuman.
"Please wake up, Brody. Please don't leave me. You are my home, and I haven't had a home in a really long time, and I need you. Please open your eyes."