Page 31 of Serious Cowboy

“Tim…” was all she able to get out.

“Thanks for answering your phone,” he cut her off, his tone full of sarcasm.

“I was talking to Daisy, not that that’s any of your business.”

“Callie, Zeke was in a car accident tonight,” her brother stated flatly, and she realized that his earlier words hadn’t been sarcastic after all. They’d been stressed.

“Oh, no. Is he okay?”

“No,” Tim said, his tone utterly hollow, and dread suffused Callie’s entire system. “He’s really not. He’s…” Her brother trailed off, and icy panic flowed over every inch of her skin.Please don’t say dead… Please don’t… “Unconscious. He’s breathing but totally unresponsive. They airlifted him by medivac to the hospital in Billings. I don’t want to scare you, but it looks…” His voice broke. “It looksbad.”

“I’m on my way.”

Callie remembered the text Zeke had sent her two days ago. After going so long with zero communication, she’d at firstbeen buoyed to receive his response, but once she’d read it, her feelings had bottomed right back out again.

Zeke had claimed that he missed her, which was nice, but then he’d written than he was sorry, too. There was something so sparse, so final about that sentiment. As if he was apologizing that they were over but not demonstrating any need for that status to ever alter.

So, she hadn’t sent him anything back.

Should she have? Should she have tried yet again despite everything?

Callie was vaguely aware that she’d said something to her bestie to end that call, and that she’d somehow managed to get into her car and drive to Billings using her GPS. She knew her brother had already departed because he’d contacted her again from the road an hour later. She didn’t listen to anything as she drove, not her usually peppy pop songs or her favorite podcasts.

Nothing.

It was like her psyche had been overfilled and couldn’t accept even one thing more.

In spite of her being a purposeful optimist who always,alwaystried to look on the bright side, this time, her usual tricks to think only about the most positive of outcomes didn’t work. She couldn’t seem to block the worst-case scenarios careening through her mind, one after the other.

And once she arrived at the hospital, this ability didn’t improve. Tim had arrived several minutes before her, and she found him traveling back and forth between two other people, a man and a woman who stayed on opposite sides of the waiting room.She started to join her brother, but then held herself back. Something about how Tim stalked across the floor warned her that her presence might not be welcomed right then.

Eventually, wringing her hands in distress, she saw her brother head in her direction.

“Zeke’s in a coma,” he informed her without preamble. “From what I can gather, he suffered some broken bones and a concussion. They’ve already done surgery and put his leg in traction. He’s in critical condition.”

Callie blinked as she took this information in. She knew the femur was the thigh bone and the largest bone in the human body. The force required to break it had to have been substantial.

“What happened in the accident?”

“On my way here, I spoke to Sheriff Talbott.” The lines of Tim’s face were as grim as she’d ever seen them. “There were patches of black ice on the bridge Zeke was crossing. Best the sheriff could guess was that he might’ve hit one right when a semi-truck was coming in the opposite lane. They smashed into one another.”

“Oh, my gosh,” Callie gasped, but her brother pushed on.

“His old pickup crashed through the cement barrier on the side and went over, landing in the ravine below upside down. At least he didn’t end up in the water of the creek. There are parts of it deep enough that since he’d been knocked out, he might’ve drowned.”

Callie wanted to be thankful for that sliver of silver lining, but she couldn’t be. All she could feel was horror and shock.

“When’s he going to wake up?”

Tim sighed. “They don’t know.”

“How can they not know?”

“Callie, the human body heals at its own rate. The best we as doctors can do is repair what we can, give medications that might assist in that process, and wait to see what happens.”

She didn’t know why she found those words so devastating—even more devastating than the list of Zeke’s terribly serious injuries—but she did. Tears sprouted in her eyes and spilled down her cheeks.

Her brother wrapped an arm around her, and she covered her face with her hands and buried her head in his chest. She wept for a moment before something else occurred to her.