Cal pulled into the hospital parking lot and felt a sense of near panic take hold of him. He had never been so glad to have Jesse by his side. Having her with him on the trip to Paul Weatherby’s ranch had helped him in ways he could not put words to. But having her here right now meant even more.

Jesse could understand silence. She had been a friend of silence even when other young women her age were prattling on at a terrifically inflated rate of speed. They jabbered on for hours about clothes and shoes and things that Cal could not wrap his mind around. And in stark contrast, Jesse was capable of long silences punctuated by thoughtful comments or sentences or even questions about things that resonated with Cal. And yes, this was a judgment on his part. He was sure that there were plenty of people who would not be able to appreciate Jesse’s brand of dry humor or her snarky attitude and very hard practicality, but Cal had always appreciated the fact that Jesse knew what was important.

How could she not? Her whole life had been ripped away from her at the tender age of eleven. That experience had left an indelible mark on her soul. But it had also made her uniquely suited for a man like Cal who could not tolerate frivolity.

“Are you all right?”

“Huh?” He looked over at her and felt as though she had caught him doing something wrong. “I’m fine. Why?”

“Because we’ve been sitting here for about five minutes.” She sat back in her seat and folded one leg over the other to curl up in the passenger seat of his truck. “Believe me. I’m comfy. If you want to sit here forever, that’s fine with me. Although I’m getting a little hungry.”

“Me too,” he muttered. “Visit first and then food. We’ll use that as an excuse to leave.”

“Okay.” Jesse cocked her head at him. “Just so you know, your mother is going to freak out when she sees us together.”

“I know.”

“All right.” Jesse reached for the door handle. “I just wanted to make sure you understood where all of this mess stands right now.”

He took her hand and grabbed it between his. Then he lifted it to his face and pressed his lips to her knuckles. “You’re not my sister.”

“We’re going to have to prove that to your mother and your family.” There was something in her eyes that gave him pause. “And maybe even to me. I’m confused, Cal. I’ve—I’ve had a crush on you my whole life. Now your mother is trying to tell me that not only am I wrong, but she wants me to believe that what I feel is unnatural. What am I supposed to believe?”

“Your heart.”

Cal exhaled and got out of his truck. He could see only one other Hernandez branded truck in the parking lot. Hopefully that was a good sign. Of course, he could be totally wrong. Nobody had called him. Maybe his father had been released. Maybe this trip was in vain and he was going to have to go to his parents’ home to confront them. If that’s what he could really call it.

With Jesse right beside his shoulder, Cal walked from the parking lot to the building. The automatic doors whooshed open, and he stepped inside the sterile-smelling place. The coffee shop was closed now. He passed it by without a glance. He did not want to remember the conversation he’d had with Laredo just a short time ago.

“Straight up, then?” Jesse’s hand was hovering over the elevator button. “Or would you rather take the stairs to put it off just that much longer?”

“I don’t think my body could handle the stairs after today’s excitement,” Cal groaned.

“At least the stairs wouldn’t make us smell any worse,” Jesse observed as they stepped onto the elevator. “I feel like I’ve got so much animal hair and crap all over me that anyone with a decent nose could smell me for miles.”

Cal appreciated her humor as they headed up to the fifth floor where the patient rooms were located. No matter what, having Jesse around seemed to ease his feelings of discomfort and nervousness. She was a constant mood lifter, and he appreciated the hell out of her.

“Are you ready?” Jesse asked as the elevator dinged and the doors swung wide open.

“Not really.”

“Good. That makes two of us.” Jesse stepped off.

Cal suddenly realized that he had no idea where he was going. “I guess we can stop at the nurses’ station.”

“It’s okay. I’ve got this,” she told him. “I was here the other day, remember?”

“Right.” Cal had kind of forgotten that she had been here with his mother long before the rest of them.

He followed Jesse’s lead down the hallway and to a room near the end on the right side of the wide hallway. The hospital itself smelled exactly like all hospitals did. There was an odor of cleanser and bleach. The sounds were all beeping and whirring as the machines that ran the floor and kept the patients nice and monitored according to doctors’ orders did their thing. The floors were white. The ceiling was white. The walls were whiter. Everything was horribly fake and the silence was oppressive.

Of course, this perception might have been flavored by Cal’s innate distrust and hatred of hospitals. He’d been in more than a few himself. He didn’t like them. He’d visited his brothers after their various accidents and foibles. Hospitals meant death and usually change that took on epic negative proportions.

Jesse gently reached down and took his hand before they walked into the room. She gave his fingers a squeeze and bumped his shoulder with her own. “It’s going to be okay.”

He wrapped his arm around her and drew her into a hug. They stopped walking and lingered right outside the door with the hand-scrawled label—HERNANDEZ. Cal gave Jesse a long hug and felt as though having her there against him was a little bit like coming home no matter where he was.

“Thank you for coming with me,” he whispered.

She poked him in the belly. It was an affectionate and familiar gesture that never failed to make him smile. “You’re welcome. But we should go inside before you mother decides to come out here and investigate.”

She was absolutely right. So, Cal pasted a stoic expression on his face and walked right into the hospital room with its beeping and whirring machines and sterile bleach smell. His father was lying on the bed. The back of the bed was reclined so that he was lying at an angle with his head raised.

It never ceased to amaze Cal at what a hospital bed could do to someone. Just being in one seemed to make Joe Hernandez look shrunken and old. Yes. The man was nearly sixty years old. The hard life of working out in the sun and rain and wind had taken a toll on Joe’s body. His face was weathered, and his skin was tanned to a leathery consistency that reminded Cal of an old, well-used saddle. But it was the hard drinking and hard living that made this man look eighty instead of sixty. Joe Hernandez was an alcoholic and they all knew it.

“Calvin.”

Avery Hernandez had been sitting by the window doing some needlepoint. Cal could remember his mother doing needlepoint at almost every single tense moment in their family history. It was what she did to cope. He could not fault her for that. But he could and would fault her for the expression that crept up on her eyes and face when she realized that Jesse Collins had come to visit along with Cal.

“What’s she doing here?” Avery sniffed.

Cal glanced at Jesse. She didn’t look hurt by this slight. That probably made Cal feel worse than anything else. He took Jesse’s hand and kept her right beside him. “She came with me. She agreed to come with me because I didn’t want to come alone. And since she just went out to confront Paul Weatherby with me, I appreciate every second she’s willing to give me.”

Avery’s nose was quivering, and her lips were pinched tightly together, but it was Joe who stirred at the mention of Paul Weatherby. The old man lifted his hand and pointed at Cal. “What are you talking about? You confronted that old bastard?”

“We did,” Cal told his father. “He murdered some of our stock last night. Nitrate poisoning. The inspectors and the veterinarians verified that they were our stock and that they’d been rebranded. That’s enough, don’t you think?”

“Enough for what?” Joe demanded. “To go and talk to that bastard?”

Avery went to the bedside and pressed her hand to Joe’s leg. “You don’t need to worry about that anymore. You’re retired.”

“The hell I am,” the old man grunted. “You don’t get to tell me whether or not I’m retiring. You’re leaving me anyway.”

“Then, maybe I won’t.” There was a malicious glint in Avery’s eye that made Cal’s stomach knot uncomfortably. “Maybe I’ll just stay with you forever so I can keep you from doing anything else that will screw up your life even more than it already has.”

Cal could have sworn that his mother actually glared at Jesse when she said these words. What was the woman’s problem? Why, after all these years, was she suddenly so very angry at Jesse? Cal sucked in a deep breath and prepared to wade into the morass of family crap that he had avoided like the plague ever since he could remember.

But Jesse beat him to it. She shook her head at Avery. “Are you really that bitter? You’d honestly stay with a man just so you can make him miserable and remind him of his mistakes for the rest of his life? What kind of person does that make you? It’s pathetic. You know that?”

“You stay out of this, girl!” Avery retorted. “I tolerated you in my household because I felt sorry for you. But you’ve set your sights on my son, and that’s absolutely unforgivable. Do you understand me? You don’t belong with Cal. It’s wrong! I thought we worked through that when you were just a girl. I thought you understood that my Calvin is not for you!”

“Why?” Cal finally managed to untangle his voice. “Why am I not for her, Mom? What kind of sense does that make?”

“Your father was screwing her mother!” Avery burst out. She flung up her hands and pointed at Joe Hernandez. “We all know that’s true! It’s not like anyone thought to keep it a secret!”

Joe cleared his throat. Beside him, the heart monitor was climbing rapidly as his heartbeat sped up and his anxiety began to climb. “Avery, we’ve talked about this.”

“You finally admitted that I was right,” she snapped.

Joe started coughing. His heart monitor was now racing. Cal felt a horrible sensation of vertigo as he saw what was going to happen. His mother was so angry at his father that she was going to drive him into an early grave for no good reason other than it would make her feel better to make him suffer.

“Dad,” Cal said sharply. “Dad, you have to calm down. You’re getting overexcited for nothing.”

“It’s not nothing,” Joe argued. “This woman is trying to take something beautiful between Amelia and me and make it dirty and sordid.”

“It was dirty and sordid!” Avery shouted. “Our son saw you with Amelia! Do you have any idea what that did to him? And your other infidelities drove him away for good! Our youngest child ran away from home to get away from you. What does that say about you as a person?”

“Okay. Mom! You have to stop!” Cal snarled.

Cal realized that there were several pairs of footsteps rushing down the hallway. His father was gasping for air. His coughing had turned to choking as he struggled to breathe. His hands were pressed against his chest, and his face was steadily turning blue.

Jesse jumped into action. She grabbed Avery’s arm and steered her out into the hallway just as a whole contingent of nurses and doctors ran in. They were shouting and calling to each other as they pulled out a crash cart.

Cal stood in the corner of the room feeling absolutely helpless as he watched his father gasp for air as the medical personnel tried valiantly to get his heart rate back to normal. Something wasn’t right. His father’s face was turning bluer by the second. His fingers were purple. His complexion grew ashen.

“Get him out of here!” A doctor pointed to Cal.

A nurse leaped into action. She snatched Cal by the hand and threw him out of the room as though he had been ejected by slingshot. He stumbled into the hallway, and the door slammed closed behind him. He could still hear though. He could hear too much. The doctor’s frantic shout was punctuated by the nurses’ terse answers as they rushed around the bed trying to stabilize Joe Hernandez.

“What’s happening?”

Cal managed to focus on Jesse. She was standing across the hall with her arms around his mother. Avery was sobbing as though she were the one on the other side of that doorway. Or rather she was sobbing as though she actually cared what happened to her philandering husband. And even though moments ago Avery Hernandez had been telling Jesse to get out of the room and to leave Cal alone, now Avery was clinging to Jesse as though she were a lifeline.

Forever did not seem like long enough, and yet Cal had the feeling that only a few seconds had passed. Then the door to his father’s room opened. The action was ominous. There was no more activity inside the room. There was nothing. And the lack of activity and motion was a bad sign that Cal could not ignore.

“Sir?” A man with the name BHATIA stitched onto his scrubs pulled the mask from his face and sighed heavily. Then he looked from Cal to Avery and Jesse. “I’m sorry, but your father sustained a massive heart attack, and we were unable to restart his heart. He’s gone.”

The words seemed to come from the end of a tunnel. Cal could not process them. He could not even manage to think about what they meant. He was stuck. Then his mother’s keening wail echoed through the hospital hallway, and Cal knew that their lives would never be the same again.