I came to in pieces.

The world was all wrong—too white, too still. The ceiling above me flickered with artificial light, humming faintly like it was trying to lull me back under. For a moment, I wasn't sure if I was alive or if this was the part where everything finally quieted for good.

Pain anchored me.

It started behind my eyes, a dull pressure that pulsed with every heartbeat, spreading down my neck and curling around my ribs like something half-feral. My mouth was dry, cottony, and the scent of antiseptic clung thick in the air, stinging the back of my throat. Somewhere to my right, a monitor beeped in soft, steady intervals, a rhythm that felt foreign against the memory of chaos still pounding through my chest.

Then the images came—sharp and out of order.

The chute. Colt's body slamming into the dirt. Blood. My hands covered in it. The sound of hooves like thunder, like war. His face, pale and twisted in pain. His voice—rough, stubborn, alive.

Alive.

I sucked in a breath too fast and choked on it, my chest seizing under the strain. Panic flooded my limbs, but they felt slow, disconnected. My arms wouldn't lift. My legs didn't move. Only my heart seemed to know something was wrong, beating like it was trying to outrun the moment I'd just escaped.

A soft rustle beside me. Then a voice.

"You're awake, sweetheart."

The words floated down like snow, slow and kind, too gentle for the storm still inside me. I turned my head—everything sluggish, swimming—and found a nurse standing next to the bed, her scrubs dotted with cartoon scarecrows and pumpkins. Autumn. October, maybe. I hadn't even realized we were that far into the year.

I blinked at her, trying to pull her face into focus. Her hair was tucked under a scrub cap, her eyes lined with exhaustion or maybe pity—it was hard to tell which. I didn't recognize her. That felt wrong.

"Where am I?" My voice was more breath than sound. It scraped out of me like gravel, hoarse and thin.

She leaned in, brushing a cool hand along my wrist to check the line taped there. "You're at St. Vincent's. Cody. You've been here a few hours. You're safe now."

Safe.

The word settled in the space between us like dust on glass—weightless, untouched, meaningless.

I stared past the nurse, past the walls, past the too-bright lights that tried to pretend everything was fine. Like the world hadn't ended hours ago in the dirt.

How could I be safe, when I still felt Colt's blood clinging to my skin like it belonged there? When the sound of him hitting the ground kept playing in my head on a loop, louder than the monitors beeping beside me? He'd looked at me like he wasn't sure I was real. Like maybe he thought I was the last thing he'd ever see.

That kind of look doesn't just go away. It brands itself into you.

I swallowed, my throat raw like I'd been screaming—maybe I had. I couldn't remember. Everything was fractured at the edges, the pain curling up in strange places, like it didn't know where to settle.

The nurse smiled at me again—soft, practiced—and I could tell she meant well. People always mean well when they don't know what else to say.

"Can I get some water?" I didn't even recognize the sound of my own voice.

She nodded quickly and poured water into a flimsy plastic cup. I took it with fingers that didn't feel like mine. They shook so bad I had to hold it with both hands, sipping slow. The water was cool, but it tasted like nothing. It didn't settle anything in me. Didn't touch the heat burning low in my chest.

Didn't undo a thing.

She moved around me, checking tubes, smoothing wires, adjusting the IV with a gentleness that made me want to flinch. It felt wrong to be handled like something fragile when I'd already shattered.

To her, I was just another chart. Another night shift.

She hadn't been there. She hadn't seen what I saw.

"Your boyfriend is still in surgery," the nurse said, voice soft like she thought it might break the air.

Boyfriend.

The word hit like a slap—too intimate, too soon. The water caught in my throat, and I coughed, a dry, scraping sound that cracked through the silence. Pain flared sharp and bright beneath my ribs, reminding me I was still flesh, still bleeding somewhere inside.

"Boyfriend?" I rasped, and it sounded wrong in my mouth. Like I was saying someone else's name.

She gave a small frown, eyes tilting with confusion. "The paramedics said you were holding hands in the ambulance. I just assumed..."

Holding hands.

The memory flickered—mud on my knees, Colt's hand in mine, his fingers barely curling back around mine as they loaded us in together. I hadn't even realized I was holding on that tight until they tried to separate us. I wasn't thinking about the worlds eyes on us. I just didn't want him to go alone. Didn't want the last thing he felt to be fear.

But it hadn't been what she thought. It wasn't soft or sweet. It was survival.

I opened my mouth to tell her that, to explain that we weren't—anything, not really. That a few months of passing glances and rough laughter over campfire beer didn't make you someone's anything. That I didn't even know if he had a favorite song or why he was here, or even how long he was staying.

But I closed my mouth again. Because right now, I couldn't afford to be a stranger.

If I was nothing, they'd keep me on this side of the glass. They wouldn't let me near him, or tell me how he was.

So I forced a smile. Thin. Hollow. "It's new," I said quietly. "We haven't really... defined it yet."

The nurse smiled like that made sense to her. Like that cleared something up.

"Well," she said, tucking a clipboard under her arm, "you're both in good hands now."

Good hands. I wanted to laugh, but it stuck in my throat.

Because I'd seen good hands crushed beneath hooves. I'd seen good hands reach for a bull chute with a grin and a dare and no damn idea what kind of storm they were unleashing. And I'd seen Colt's good hands go limp in the dirt.

So no—I didn't trust good hands. Not anymore.

I looked back at her, voice thin. "Has his family been told?"

The nurse hesitated. Just the slightest shift in her expression, but I caught it.

Her hand paused at the edge of the tray she was rearranging, her fingers smoothing over the plastic like she needed something to do. "We didn't have a number for them," she said finally, gentle but uncertain. "No emergency contact listed in his file. No one answered when we tried the number from the rodeo circuit paperwork. I figured... maybe you'd know who to call."

I didn't.

The truth of it hit me like a stone in the chest. I didn't know who to call because Colt didn't talk about them. Not really. Not the way people talk about family when they're close. Just pieces, sometimes, dropped in conversation like gravel—his mom, a brother maybe. All dusted over with that quiet tension he carried, the kind that doesn't beg to be noticed but settles heavy anyway.

He was a man who kept his history locked behind his teeth. And maybe I should've asked more. Maybe I should've pushed. But you don't push a man like Colt Langmore. You wait. You listen. You earn it.

"I don't have a number," I said quietly, eyes fixed on the knot in the blanket over my lap. "I don't think he... talks to them much."

The nurse's face softened. "That's alright. We'll keep trying."

The nurse hesitated at the foot of the bed, her fingers skimming the edge of the tray again, like she wasn't sure whether to say the next part or leave me to sleep.

"Your emergency contact is listed as Stella Odell?"

Her name cut through the quiet like a dull blade. Stella.

It lodged somewhere beneath my ribs, not sharp—but deep.

I didn't answer at first. Just stared at the blanket pooled around my waist, tracing the small knot near my thigh with the edge of my fingernail. I hadn't heard her name out loud in a long time. Not since Daddy's funeral. Not since the last time we stood shoulder to shoulder in the same pew, both wearing black and pretending grief hadn't already carved a wedge between us.

We hadn't spoken since. Not really. A text on my birthday, a comment on some rodeo result she'd seen online. She stayed in Denver, wrapped up in that safe little world she built for herself—husband, two kids, a dog with a Beatles name. Suburbia. Soccer games. Clean sidewalks. All the things that made sense to her and never once fit me.

She left the dirt behind. Left me behind.

I still remembered what she said the day I told her I was riding again. That long silence on the phone. Then, finally, her voice—small and scared.
Losing you would break me, Lemon. I can't do that.

And maybe I should've heard the love in that. Maybe I should've thanked her for caring at all. But all I felt back then was the slap of it—like she'd already decided I wasn't worth sticking around for.

The nurse's voice pulled me back.

"She answered. Said she was worried," she added gently. "But she was told to wait until morning before we got her an update."

Worried. I turned the word over in my head, not sure what to do with it. It felt too distant. Like something you said when you didn't know how to feel, but figured you should feel something. That was Stella. Loving from a safe distance. Calling instead of coming. Praying, probably, instead of asking what I needed.

Still, she picked up. I guess that meant something.

"Thanks," I murmured, quiet and automatic, though my voice came out thick, like it had to fight its way up past everything I hadn't said to her in years.

The nurse nodded once and left, her shoes squeaking softly against the tile. The door clicked shut behind her. And just like that, it was me and the quiet again.

The silence didn't stay long.

The door opened again, quieter this time. A man stepped in, mid-forties maybe, white coat, clipboard clutched in one hand like a shield. His eyes were sharp behind smudged lenses, but his face was practiced calm, the kind that didn't flinch no matter what kind of news it had to deliver.

He didn't ask if I wanted to hear it. He just started talking.

"They stitched your back," he said, flipping through the chart like he already knew it by heart. "There'll be scarring. Not deep, but enough that it'll stick with you."

I nodded once, slow. Scars were nothing new. My body already told stories it never got permission to speak out loud.

"Left shoulder's the worst of it," he continued. "Torn rotator cuff. It'll take time. You'll need physical therapy, maybe surgery if it doesn't heal right on its own. Could lose some mobility long-term."

I didn't ask how much. I didn't need to.

The ache in my shoulder had already settled into something bone-deep and unforgiving. I'd known the moment I hit the ground that something had gone wrong. Not in the surface way—something deeper. The kind of pain that doesn't scream, just settles in and starts unpacking like it plans to stay.

He kept talking, each sentence a clean cut.

"Leg's fine. Scared us at first with the blood loss, but it's mostly surface. Concussion's more of a concern—we'll keep you for observation tonight, unless there's someone to take you home. Someone who can keep an eye on you. Monitor for dizziness, confusion. Memory loss."

Colt.

The word tried to form, but I swallowed it. It was like trying to say a name through a cracked window—muffled, fragile, too far away to reach.

I didn't ask how long he'd be in recovery, or what kind of shape he was in now. Because the doctor hadn't come in here for that. He hadn't come to talk about Colt Langmore.

And I was too afraid of the silence that might follow if I did.

I stared at the blanket twisted in my lap, fingers curling around the edge like I could hold myself together with it. My shoulder throbbed. My spine ached. But none of it felt like the reason I couldn't breathe right.

"You'll get through this," the doctor said as he closed the chart. "Young, healthy. You're lucky."

Lucky. The word turned my stomach.

Ω