Page 59 of Wrangled

I stared at her. “How… How did you know?”

“One, because I’m your sister. Two, because I’ve seen what guilt does to people. I recognize the signs.” She put her fork down on her plate. “So tell me, what on earth do you have to feel guilty about?”

Maybe she was right. It was time for the truth.

“It’s my fault he’s dead,” I confessed quietly.

Her eyes widened. “How can it beyourfault?” When I swallowed, she got up, walked around the table to me, crouched beside my chair, took my hands in hers, then looked me in the eye. “Talk to me, Robert.”

God, this hurt.

“Kevin… Kevin was very close to his family. He had a great relationship with all of them, especially his younger brother, Chase. And then something happened…”

“I’m going to guess it wasn’t something good.”

“Chase went out on his first motorcycle. He’d only had it two or three months.”

“Oh Jesus. I think I know what’s coming.” Her expression grew pained.

I nodded. “A car took him out on the highway.”

Tears welled in her eyes. “Oh, his poor family.”

“It hit Kevin awful hard. And then he got upset, which led to him drinking. And he drank. And drank. I tried to get him to talk about it, to bring his feelings out into the open, but he just wanted to be left alone.” I could still hear him.

Not everyone is like you, okay? Some of us are shit at showing our emotions.

“And then one night, I obviously tried too hard.” Another hard swallow. “We had a fight. Kevin drank a shitload of whiskey, then stormed out of the house, I went after him, but he wasn’t listening.”

She pulled out the chair next to mine, sat, and squeezed my hands. “You didn’t kill him because you had an argument. He’d been drinking.”

I pulled free of her. “You don’t understand. If I hadn’t tried to get him to open up… If I hadn’t tried to comfort him… help him… he wouldn’t have run out on me. He wouldn’t have gotten on that horse. If I’d just left him alone, it wouldn’t have happened and he’d still be alive.”

Diana stared at me for a moment before taking a deep breath. “Okay, now you need to listen tome. You remember when Dad was dying in the hospital, I’d go there and sit with him why you were taking care of the ranch?” I nodded. “Well, I got to talking with his nurse. I was feeling guilty—”

“What didyouhave to feel guilty about? You were there with him. I wasn’t.”

“I just felt I should have spent more time with him. But there was all kinds of shit going on at our ranch. Anyhow… The nurse said something to me. She said… ‘I’ve seen people do nothing when someone they love is dying, and they feel guilty about that. I’ve seen folks who dideverythingto help their loved one, and they still feel guilty when that loved one dies.Everyonefeels guilty, but nothing good ever comes out of those feelings. You can’t change the past. Youcanforgive yourself, even when you feel there’s nothing to forgive. Adding guilt just makes everything worse.” Her eyes glistened. “And you just talked to me about this for the first time. Was I right? Have you ever told anyone what you just told me?”

“No,” I admitted. “I kept everything bottled up inside.”

“Well, you finally let it out. And maybe now, you’re ready to deal with your loss. Because you know what? Ifinallyunderstand what’s been going on.”

“You do?”

She nodded. “All this time, I thought you were mourning Kevin, that you’d been madly in love with him. But that wasn’t it at all, was it?”

I pushed my plate away from me. “I’ve thought a lot about this the past few days. When I said I loved him the other night, that wasn’t a lie, but you’re right, we weren’t madly, deeply in love. What we had was a very symbiotic relationship.” I huffed. “This seems to be the ranch for that type of relationship.” Except I thought Kevin and I had been close, whereas Teague and Butch?

Yeah, not so much.

Hey, it works for them, right?

Then I remembered. It had worked for me too, years before Kevin showed up.

Good Lord. I haven’t thought about him in decades.

He was still there of course, in the dark recesses of my mind.

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