Page 55 of Came the Closest

“You know your brothers only mean the best for you.” My words break into the tense silence. “Right?”

My loud, adrenaline junkie, middle child who prefers to be the center of attention remains quiet.

“I know you don’t have Tripp in your life right now,” I say. Based on the way his shoulders tense, I’ve struck a nerve. “A lot has been thrown at you, and I get that. But you need people, Colton. I’m not Tripp and I’ll never try to be. I am here, though.”

He shakes his head and looks away from me, but I see the tear running down his cheek. It becomes a drop on his chin that he doesn’t brush away. “You should be with Graham. It’s his night,” he says blankly. “I’m fine.”

“You’re not fine,” I counter. “I’m right where I should be. Graham is fine. Talk to me, Colton.”

He shakes his head again, more firmly this time. He gets to his feet, and I do the same, but I stand still when he paces to the end of the dock. He stands there, wind ruffling his dark curls and flapping at his unbuttoned shirt. Unmoving, he looks out over the vast, white-capped blue water. I stay where I am, my hands in the pockets of my linen shorts.

But I don’t stay quiet.

“One of these days, Colton, you’re going to have to stop running,” I say evenly. Loud enough to be heard over boat engines and loud enough to be heard over his hurricane force thoughts. “I can’t stop you, and neither can anyone else. But you can only trip so many times before you fall. I’ve been there—I’ve fallen. It hurt like hell. I would never, not on my worst day, wish it on anyone. But if you don’t stop running, Colton, your legs will eventually give out.

“You don’t have to talk to me,” I continue, fighting the emotion building in my throat, “but I am here. I haven’t been for a long time, and I know that, but I am now. Tell me about everything important. Tell me about nothing important. Just…” My voice breaks. “Just let me in, Colton. Please.”

He spins around and crosses the distances between us with long, brisk strides. Words pour out of him, like a cloudburst in the middle of a steaming July day.

“You want to know how I’m doing?” he asks. “Join the club, because I wish I could tell you. I wish I knew what to tell myself. I don’t know. The only thing I’m good at is being slowly and tortuously torn out of my grasp even though they say it’s not. I’m the temporary guardian for my dead mother’s four-year-old son, and then what? After these three months? What happens to Milo when it goes to court, and I can’t keep him, and my teenage sister sacrifices a future of her own just so he doesn’t go into the system? What happens when summer ends and I break up with my fake fiancée, who is the only woman I have ever loved? What happens when I’m too washed up and broken to continue competing, but I have nothing else left? What happens then, Dad? What happens then?”

Sobs wrack his tall, broad body. His eyes are bloodshot, his chest heaving with the effort of breathing. At his sides, his clammy hands have curled into fists that he lifts to pound against his temples.

He’s breaking in front of me. Piece by piece, he’s coming apart, and I do the only thing I can do.

I walk up to him and I put my arms around him like I should’ve been there to do when he was six and he scratched his knee. When he was ten and couldn’t understand the math problems on his homework. When he was twelve and his mother left for good. When he was seventeen and competed in his first rodeo. When he was twenty-one or twenty-three and won his first and second world championship. When he was twenty-five and broke things off with Cheyenne. When he was twenty-seven and watched the love of his life marry someone else. When he was thirty and he found out that his mentor had been in an accident.

For the thousands of times I should have held my son, I do it now. He’s as tall as me, and as broad, but I hold him like I would have held that six or seventeen- or twenty-three-year-old boy. He doesn’t like it. Tremors course through his shuddering body, and he pushes his fists into my chest, but I only hold him firmer.

Minutes, or maybe only seconds later, he finally gives up the fight. He doesn’t reciprocate the hug and his tears don’t dry, but his head drops to my shoulder.

His body quakes with sobs, and I hold him.

My phone vibrates in my pocket with a call, and I hold him.

A northwest wind blows, lifting goosebumps on our skin, and I hold him.

I don’t talk. I don’t tell him he could be good at anything if he gives himself the chance to be. I don’t tell him he could be what Milo needs long-term if he wanted to be. I don’t tell him I know what it’s like to love one woman and to lose her, but I also know what it’s like to get her back.

If I said those things, he wouldn’t hear me.

Instead, I say the only thing that encompasses everything in one statement.

“I love you, Colton,” I say, and when I say it, I mean it with every fiber of my being.

He doesn’t say it back. He doesn’t even meet my eyes when his body stops shaking and I release him.

I know he heard me. Because for a split second, he completely stilled at my words. And when he’s ready to say it back to me, I’ll be here. Waiting with another one of the hugs I should’ve given him all the years before this.

Chapter Seventeen

Fake Fiancés Do

Cheyenne

Tonight is Ember’s bookish bachelorette garden party—as per the invite Graham gave Colton to give to me. I have absolutely no idea what to wear. I dressed up every day to work at The Art Institute of Chicago for several years, but standing in front of my closet now, all those clothes feel too full of memories.

Memories of the less than savory variety. Not the good ones, like my brothers parading out of the lake house wearing my floral linen pants in their late teens, or Daddy lifting my bucket hat from my head to plop onto his.