Page 53 of The Brave and the Reckless (Bravetown #1)

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N OAH

I set the last of my boxes down by the door and dropped on to the splintering porch steps.

I’d have to fix these at some point. Right now, I needed a minute to breathe.

Not physically. I’d managed to get all my things from the staff housing complex to the ranch in two drives.

But I wasn’t coping well with the change.

I was returning two years sooner than I’d anticipated.

The house was supposed to be completely overhauled by the time I was going to live in it again.

It was supposed to be new and wholly mine.

Now, it was neither.

The front door was still notched where my father had thrown an empty liquor bottle against it. Half the kitchen was still covered in construction materials. My bedsheets still smelled like a girl I’d only dream of from now on.

It wasn’t the place I’d wanted it to be when I moved back in.

I glanced down at the ailing wood beneath my boots, held down by shiny new nails for now. Maybe clean breaks and fresh starts were all lies. There’d always be jagged edges that you just had to build your life around.

If that was the case, this wasn’t the worst place to build a life.

The sun was just beginning to set, lowering toward the tree line that separated this place from the rest of Wild Fields, and it bathed the entire estate in golden light.

Sprawling grass as far as the eye could see, birds swooping through the air, and the kind of quiet you couldn’t get anywhere else.

I wanted a future here, but my throat constricted every time I remembered that she wouldn’t be in it.

My attention snapped to the driveway when the crunching of tires on gravel disrupted the silence.

Sanny’s car rolled to a stop next to mine.

He’d offered to carry boxes with me today, but I had to do it for myself.

I’d made the decision to move here, and each box had helped turn it from a far-off concept into my new life.

When he’d insisted on helping anyway, I’d sent him to the hardware store.

“You look tired,” he said by way of greeting as he jumped out of the car.

“Thanks, always good to hear,” I called back.

Sinan just grinned and shrugged before he grabbed a paper bag from the passenger seat. He set it down on top of the box I hadn’t bothered carrying inside yet.

“Have you talked to Esra since she left?” he asked and sat down next to me.

My throat momentarily tightened at the mention of her name.

“No.” I’d wanted to. I’d opened her contact details multiple times a day, only to lock my screen and shove the phone back in my pocket.

I wanted to hear her voice and her laugh as she told me about her days, and for her to call me cowboy .

I also owed her an apology, but even if she agreed to talk to me, it wouldn’t change the outcome.

She’d always meant to leave after the summer.

I had to live with the jagged edge that remained.

So I swallowed everything I wanted to say to Esra and every detail I wanted to pry from Sanny, and asked, “Why?”

“I tried today, but she hung up on me.” He sighed and scratched the back of his neck. We hadn’t talked about his sister since the day I landed her in the hospital, after he’d informed me that his parents had booked her on a red-eye back to New York. “I think I messed up.”

“Yeah… I think we both did.”

“What did you do?” He sounded genuinely puzzled.

I raised my brows at him. He may not have known that we’d been together, but he had seen how I’d let her fall off the horse just like everyone else in the park that day.

“Because of the accident? Man, that wasn’t your fault.”

“We fought over her disappearing and partying all weekend, and the tension between us affected Tornado. I shouldn’t have let her sit on an agitated horse, Sanny. I should have helped her out of the saddle.” My throat tightened again and turned my voice hoarse. “I really fucked up. I’m so sorry.”

“Noah, with all due respect…” He whipped his flat hand over the back of my head. It was barely hard enough to cause me to nod.

“What was that for?” I groaned.

“Just trying to smack your brain back into place.” He laughed and shook his head.

Clearly this hadn’t been torturing him like it had me.

“Accidents happen. It sucks that the outcome tends to be worse for her, but that doesn’t change the fact that it was just an accident.

She could have just as easily slipped in the mud and still dislocated her shoulder. ”

My gaze snapped past him to the stables, where we had lost our footing and dropped into the mud. She had panicked and prodded at me until I reassured her that I was fine. It just clicked now. Esra lived with the constant awareness that one bad fall could seriously injure her.

“Tell her that I’m sorry anyway, okay?” Even if he didn’t blame me for the accident, I’d still caused her serious pain. “I’m sorry she got hurt.”

“She doesn’t want to talk to me. I think I get it though.” He grimaced and rubbed a hand over his knuckles. “I called my dad yesterday. I called him . My parents, who have called every single day all summer, haven’t actually reached out since Esra went back home.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m not. Made me realize that I let them treat me like an extension of the tight leash they keep on her.”

“They bubble-wrap her,” I echoed the words Esra had used to describe her upbringing.

“Yeah, kind of.” He slapped his hands against his knees. “Anyway, I have the rest of the shower curtain stuff in the car. They didn’t have oil-rubbed bronze, only Venetian bronze, but they look the same to me. The Home Depot guy said the color variation…”

His words faded into the background as we walked around his car and I grabbed the curved curtain-rod pieces from his trunk.

They would come together in an oval to hang above the tub in the master bathroom.

It was a cheaper option than getting a glass wall fitted under the slanted roof, and Esra had called it farmhouse chic .

In another life, I didn’t care that they were the wrong shade of dark brown.

In this one, however, this wasn’t the color Esra had picked and put on the list of renovations, and it felt wrong.

Sanny would probably smack me over the head again if I asked him to return this. I didn’t even have an image of the right color in mind.

All I knew was that these were the incorrect bronze, and Esra was gone, and I didn’t have so much as a picture of us, and I couldn’t tell my best friend that my chest felt hollow without her here. And it was like we never even existed.

I glanced at the stables again, wishing I could walk over and let Tornado steady me.

But the stalls were far from ready, so my horses were still in Bravetown’s care for now.

Even the one comfort I’d always relied on was gone, and I only had myself to blame.

Because I couldn’t stomach staying in Staff House B and waiting for someone else to move into Esra’s room, fill her cupboard with healthy foods, hang a towel on her hook in the bathroom. They couldn’t just replace her.

She hadn’t just left her job at Bravetown. She had left me.

And I wasn’t ready for my world to move on without her.