Serious Cowboy (Cowboys of Duncan Ranch #2)

Chapter 13

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

Callie’s phone rang, and for the most fleeting of heartbeats, hope sprung up within her that it might be Zeke, finally contacting her. But it wasn’t Zeke. Of course, it wasn’t. It was Daisy, and Callie felt a rush of disappointment, then guilt.

She shouldn’t feel let down by her bestie reaching out to her. That was just wrong. So, when she answered, she made a point of utilizing the most cheerful tone possible into her voice.

“Daze, how are you?”

“Callie, I have the most amazing news. You know how I got a new boss last month?”

“Yeah.” She’d mentioned it.

“Well, she pulled me into her office earlier today and told me how impressed she was with my work. She gave me a promotion. I’m now the new Junior Vice President over retail sales.” Daisy literally squealed with joy.

“That’s wonderful,” Callie exclaimed, reflecting that joy back at her even though she didn’t have clue what her best friend actually did for a living.

Oh, she knew Daisy worked in advertising and marketing, but when it came down to understanding her day-to-day tasks, Callie had always been a bit blurry about specifics. But it didn’t matter. If Daisy was happy, she was happy for her.

Her phone beeped in her ear, and when she glanced at the screen she could see that Tim was also trying to call her. Seeing the screen light up with the alternatives of putting her bestie on hold to accept the call or to ignore her brother’s interruption, she decided to ignore Tim. Daisy was so excited, and Callie could just call her brother back later.

After a few seconds, Tim gave up.

“So, did you get some perks with this position?” she asked.

“I did,” Daisy said, and had begun to enumerate them when another beep sounded on Callie’s end. Her brother hadn’t bothered to leave a voicemail but was calling her again. He was being such a pain. Why couldn’t he leave her a message like a normal person?

Callie continued to listen to her friend as Tim’s second interruption ceased, but then, right after that, he lit up her phone with a third call. What was up with all these back-to-back disruptions? He never did this.

What on Earth was going on with him?

“Daze, I hate to do this, but my brother is calling me over and over. Can I put you on hold for just a sec?”

“Of course. Hope everything’s okay.”

“I’m sure it is,” Callie began to say, but then it occurred to her that he wouldn’t keep bothering her like this unless something not okay had transpired.

What if one of the kids had done something to themselves? Brian, in particular, had been known to climb things he shouldn’t. Once, he’d even jumped off the roof with nothing but a sheet after he’d seen a show about people hang gliding. He’d sprained one of his ankles seriously enough to require a cast.

So, Callie switched lines.

“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 looks bad .”

“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 first been 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, always tried 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.

“Who were you speaking to? That man and that woman?”

“They’re Zeke’s parents.”

Callie looked over at one, then the other. They remained mulishly separate, not even glancing toward one another’s general vicinity. She remembered what Erika had said about how they’d acted back when Zeke had been a teenager, and their subsequent divorce.

Seemed from their current attitudes that not much had changed.

She also realized a little belatedly that talking to those two would be the only method Tim had of finding out the more vital information about Zeke. HIPAA laws now restricted who could ask about and receive a patient’s most private and personal medical details.

His mom and dad would likely be his next of kin since he wasn’t married. Well, technically, he’d been widowed, even if all those traumatic events had transpired over a decade prior.

Callie considered the tragedy he’d suffered through. Part of her reasoning for not reaching out to him after he’d texted her was because it seemed as if he simply wasn’t interested in being romantic with anyone again. She’d inadvertently reminded him of how such relationships could turn out, and he’d balked.

He’d been protecting himself.

And now that she stood in his place waiting to hear news that could possibly end in the worst of ways, she had a new appreciation for why he’d made that decision. Loving someone meant risking yourself for them. It meant that they could hurt you deeply, even on accident. Even if it was through dying.

That must’ve been what he’d wanted to prevent.

Comprehending that made her stop crying. Mainly because she was furious. Callie didn’t get angry often or easily. But understanding that Zeke had chosen not to continue with her likely due to that reason left her incensed. If they hadn’t been compatible or hadn’t had a spark, that would make sense. But because he’d been afraid? Because he’d been nervous about possibly losing her?

Talk about cutting off your nose to spite your face.

She remained in her quiet temper for the next several hours. In a way, it was like she’d reinforced herself with steel because being angry instead of sad kept her from falling apart. It kept her in control of herself and allowed her to concentrate on whatever new information came to light.

Callie and Tim stayed there at the hospital throughout that night. Thankfully, yesterday had been Saturday which meant his office wouldn’t have been open the next day regardless. But they’d have to come up with another solution after that. He had his own patients with their previously made appointments to attend to.

All through Sunday she and her brother remained, and at one point, Zeke’s vitals bottomed out, and they had to do another surgery to stop some internal bleeding. It’d been horrifying almost losing him again. But Callie didn’t descend into more weeping. She braced herself and spent all her energy on praying and picturing Zeke wake up. It was all she could let herself think about.

Before Tim drove home Sunday evening, he introduced Callie to Debbie, Zeke’s mom and Darrell, Zeke’s dad. The two—who she gauged to be somewhere in their late fifties or early sixties—seemed pleasant enough individually, still refused to so much as glimpse in the other person’s direction. How crazy was it that they had been married and birthed a child together but couldn’t be adult enough to act in that same child’s best interests?

Not even now that their son was thirty-six years old?

Concealing her irritation with them proved almost as difficult as keeping her composure while worrying about Zeke living through all this.

Zeke remained in the Intensive Care Unit throughout that week, and Callie secured herself a hotel room so she could stay nearby. She hadn’t thought to bring a suitcase or anything else in her hurry to get there, and having Amanda show up with a collection of her things was a godsend.

“How are Tim and the kids doing?” she asked her sister-in-law.

“They’re okay. How are you holding up?”

“I’m fine,” she said, then backpedaled. “Well, I’m not actually fine. But I’m hanging in there.”

Amanda hugged her. “What else can I do while I’m here? Want me to go get you something to eat?”

She hadn’t been hungry and when she could tell that she needed to eat, she’d frequented the hospital’s café. It’d been all right. Right now, she could probably consume a Michelin-starred meal and have it taste like cardboard. It was more about her frame of mind and emotional state rather than the actual food.

“Not right now.” There was something she did need from Amanda, however. “Did you know about Zeke’s past, about him losing his wife and child?”

“Oh,” she said softly. “Yeah. Tim told me about it when I first met Zeke and noticed how demoralized he always seemed to be.”

Demoralized.

“I think that’s the reason we can no longer be together,” Callie admitted. “Because he can’t deal with that loss. I’ve been texting him and leaving him voicemails, and he finally texted me back only to finalize things between us.”

“Callie, I’m so sorry, sweetie. Zeke isn’t the best on a social level and can be a little… closed off sometimes. It can come across as harsh, even when I know he doesn’t mean it to.”

“He wasn’t harsh, it was just…” She didn’t know how to put it, so Callie handed her phone over to show her. “That’s what he wrote.”

Amanda stared at the screen of Callie’s phone. “But…” She glanced between Callie and the text. “This doesn’t seem final to me.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’ll never claim to be an expert on Zeke Knight, but knowing this came from him, I’d read this as him wanting you back.”

“How do you figure?”

“One, because he responded at all. And two, because he said that he missed you, too. He wouldn’t have confessed to such a thing if he’d been trying to shut things off between you altogether. If that had been his intention, I doubt you would’ve ever heard from him or seen him again.”

“He wants to get back together?” Callie repeated, having a hard time absorbing the concept.

“Yeah, I think so.”

This time, Callie embraced Amanda. “Thank you. Thank you for telling me.”

Her sister-in-law snickered at her. “I’m not sure how this helps.”

“If he wants to get back together, then it gives him a reason to wake up. It raises his odds, you know?”

“I hope you’re right.”

Callie hoped she was right, too.