The branding pen was over one hundred yards away on the other side of the barn, and with that distance, coupled by all the noise that is inherent to a branding, nobody heard her. She grabbed her leg just behind the knee and lifted it ever so slightly in the air. Her foot hung off the end of her leg at an unnatural angle, confirming her worst fears.

She knew what broken bones looked like. She had doctored plenty of them for Henry over the years. His ribs, wrist, femur, several fingers and toes and a collarbone had all been fractured at one time or another. But this was her first broken bone—and it hurt like hell! As she sat there in unbearable pain, she couldn’t understand how it was Henry was able to be so stoic all those times when he had broken something. In fact, other than when he fractured his femur, and after the wreck he’d had on Coffee’s Western Twister, he had never even gone to the doctor. Well, not her. It was pretty clear to her already that she’d be going to the local medical clinic just as soon as she could. Annie sat on the step for what seemed like an eternity before Evelyn Trucks, her neighbor from down the road, came around the barn on her way up to the house to use the bathroom.

“Annie,” she cried, seeing Annie’s crumpled form near the tack room door. “Are you all right?” She ran over to where Annie was sitting. By now, Annie’s perpetually tanned face had turned an ashen white, and her mouth was so dry she could hardly speak.

“I broke my leg,” she said hoarsely. “Could you go get Henry for me?”

For years to come Henry would curse himself for not fixing that damn step when he had the chance. He couldn’t stand to see Annie in any kind of pain, and pain that he felt he caused her was almost too much for him to bear. But there would be more to it. The way he would come to see it, if he had fixed the step, Annie wouldn’t have fallen through it. Had she not fallen through, she wouldn’t have broken her leg, and if she hadn’t broken her leg, there’s a good chance that with her having had more rest than he over the past several months, it would have been her driving on that moonless night two weeks later—not him.

CHAPTER 2

Chronologically, it had been seventeen years since the accident. But for Henry, it was always just the day after. After seventeen years, the sights, sounds and smells of what happened that night were just as fresh, just as vivid and just as terrifying as they had been the night they occurred. While many of the details were still fuzzy, what he did know was he and Annie had taken Josh to the finals of the regional talent show, in which Josh was a finalist for his age group. Josh had gotten to the finals by playing an impressive rendition of “Ghost Riders in the Sky” on his guitar in the semi-finals that were held at the local high school a week before.