Her eyes went wide, before her features crashed in sorrow. “Oh, Brodie. I’m so sorry. That’s…devastating.”

“It was. Hardest thing I’ve ever been through. My dad was a great man, and I miss him every day.” He thought about the man’s big, booming laughter. The thing about Mack Bowie was that he’d held nothing back. He’d lived loud and hard and had encouraged his sons to do the same.

He’d believed in natural consequences, so he hadn’t disciplined a whole hell of a lot. He’d been a fair man, and he’d loved his boys more than anything.

Even after all this time, Brodie still walked into the main house expecting to hear his dad’s voice, and he always landed hard when he remembered the old man was gone.

He balled up the wet-wipe, staring at his plate. “Owl Hoot’s pretty much my way of giving him what I never did while he was alive.”

“You don’t mean the gold medal, do you?”

“I do. He devoted his whole life to us, and we didn’t make it easy for him. We were a pack of wild-assed boys growing up in the mountains, and my injury was a big wake-up call for him. By the time I came back after physical therapy, he’d hired a coach to live on the ranch and train us. He figured the only way to keep us safe was to teach us how to work with our bodies on this terrain. I think, also, he used training to give us a reason to say no when our friends were partying in high school. To me, that gold medal was a way of saying, You did good by us, Dad.”

A long-forgotten memory came up out of nowhere. “I remember my first year of competitions. I sucked. Couldn’t make a clean run to save my life.” Of course, his twelve-year-old self had been checking the crowds for his dad every couple of minutes. He’d lived to see his dad’s smile of encouragement, his pride. “And then, toward the end of that first season, my dad came into the tent with me, while I waited for my next run, and he said, You know, it just occurred to me…I don’t think anybody remembered to let you in on the joke.”

“The joke?”