Emily is hurt. You see how she fights to be close to you, but you can’t bear to have her in the same room when you’re suffering. She can’t see this. She can’t know how you’re losing this battle, how you don’t even know how to begin to fight. Unless you plunge your hand inside and rip the heart from your chest, you know the monster will win.
It’s not like you haven’t considered doing just that.
Over time, the walls close in on you. You can’t escape what’s inside. You can’t get rid of the thing that’s killing you. Your hair changes color entirely. You find half-eaten sandwiches that you don’t remember making. Your feet shrink and flop around inside your shoes. You lose so much weight that you have to buy new clothes. You stop looking like you. Your jawline narrows. Your skin is changing hue.
There comes a day when you wake up and Damon’s eyes are peering back at you.
That is when you are no longer you, and you know that you can’t stop what’s happening. So you run, trying to go faster than wind, trying to outrun the heart enveloped in your skin.
CHAPTER 1
Raise Up, Heart
Hearts are messy things. Gory, even, Cole would say. They beat and they break and they get carved out of chests and handed over to other people—who take off with that precious gift and leave only a note. A crazy, wild note that makes everyone doubt not only their heart but their sanity.
Yes, Cole knows hearts. And for the most part, he doesn’t want anything to do with anyone’s but his own. He doesn’t like to think of himself as bitter, though. Mainly because he suspects that Damon would disapprove, and for some reason Cole still wants Damon’s approval. Not that Damon disapproved of bitterness, per se; he seemed to embrace that well enough himself. But rather Cole knew deep down that Damon had loved him, at least in part, because he was not bitter, and Cole was loath to make himself unlovable to Damon even in his own memory.
Still, it had been two years since Alex had disappeared, leaving Emily wounded to the core, and leaving Cole angry and helpless, grieving again as though Damon had just died.
Even before he left, Cole sometimes raged to himself about Alex, cursing that he’d been the one to survive the car accident, despite having been the one behind the wheel. He’d let himself think in uncharitable, if truthful, moments that if Alex had done anything differently that night, then Damon would still be here. He’d still be stalking around Maryville proclaiming it po’dunk, still looking at Cole like he wanted to eat him alive, like he could taste him just by breathing the air. Even so, despite being angry, Cole had also taken comfort in Alex’s life and the knowledge that Damon’s heart still beat inside of him, the living tissue of the man Cole loved with a strength undampened by death and time.
But two years ago, just a few months after the accident, Alex began to show signs of slipping, and they all noticed it. He changed. It started slowly. Whatever it was had twisted him up into knots, making him lose weight in a way that was wrong, like an elephant shedding fat to reveal a giraffe. And he grew strange, distant. Avoiding people whenever he could. Survivor’s guilt, the doctor had told Emily. Survivor’s guilt, Emily had echoed to Cole.
Patience didn’t change anything, kindness just seemed to agitate the symptoms, and, after a while, Alex became entirely reclusive, closing himself up in the home he shared with Emily, acting paranoid and odd. He’d been scheduled to have a psych eval—Emily had insisted on it—just days before he fled. But he’d skipped it and then town, leaving a note that wildly stated, “It’s making me go. I can’t stop it. I’m so sorry. Goodbye.”
Six months of investigations and searches, traces on all sales of anti-rejection drugs in the area, and endless prayers were fruitless. Nothing led to Alex. Not a word. Not a letter. And Emily had torn her heart out with grief while Cole held her, sobbing himself, broken to lose the last piece of Damon that he could track.
That was two years ago, and now Emily sits across from him in Southern Grace Coffee with fragile smile and a question: “Do I hope? Do I dare?”
Hearts are messy things. They run rampant and wild. Cole has seen this his whole life, the way his father’s heart strayed, running all over town, and his family’s hearts were broken by divorce. He wants to tell Emily to be careful, to keep her heart safe, but she’s not him, and she never will be—and maybe he shouldn’t keep his heart safe, either. How many times have they had that discussion? Emily saying, “Damon would want this. He’d want you to be happy.”
But happy and hearts are, for Cole, not words that go together. Not now, anyway. It seems he’s become even more difficult to please, finding practically everyone too something to invest in—too young, too innocent, too hopeful. Too much like someone who’s never watched the man they love die from injuries from a senseless, violent car accident, and then signed the papers to have his heart ripped from his chest and put into the man who was driving the car. A man who then took it away from Cole forever and might be dead himself at this point.
Oh, no, these young men who ask Cole on dates, and even some of the older ones, are in no way prepared to deal with him. Cole isn’t even prepared to deal with himself.
“Of course, Emily,” Cole says. “Alex has been gone a long time. You deserve this. You should be happy.”
“It just feels scary, you know?” Emily gazes at him, grips his hand tightly. “How do I know I can trust him? Do I even trust myself? Can I?”
“You can,” Cole says, nodding, and smiling with as much love and encouragement as he can muster. “You’re strong and amazing, and I have no doubt at all that Michael loves you. Have you seen the way he looks at you? He practically floats away.”
Emily presses her lips together, trying to squash her smile, but her eyes are alight. “He does, doesn’t he?”
“He does,” Cole agrees, smiling with the joy that Emily won’t allow herself. “And what’s more, he’s a good man, Emily.”
Cole should know. He’s hired Michael Saint John be the director of Appalachian Rainbows, one of the charities Cole set up with Damon’s insurance money. It specializes in helping LGBT kids have safer school experiences. That leaves more time for Cole to work with Hardiest Hearts, a group focused on helping kids who are waiting for organ donors. In Cole’s darkest hours, of which there are still too many, the kids keep him going; thinking of their fierce determination in the face of so much difficulty and tragedy allows Cole to find a similar determination in himself.
Michael and Cole have worked closely together for the last year. He’s kind, generous, and incredibly good at his job. Not to mention, hiring Michael Saint John, getting to know and trust him, has allowed Cole to begin to truly dedicate himself to figuring out what to do with the family business he’s been gifted from his grandfather: Hart Trucking.
As his mother keeps reminding him during her trans-continental phone calls, it’s time to do one’s business or get off the pot as far as that company goes, and Cole knows it. He can either grow Hart Trucking back up to the status it held before his grandfather’s scandal, or he can chop it up and sell it. It’s time to make a choice and not just let his grandfather’s hand-picked men run the place with a little oversight from Cole to make sure they keep it all kosher.