Page 43 of Wilder

CHAPTER 11

Asher

It was funny how fast life could change.

How easily it was for everything you thought you knew to shift beneath your feet, the ground parting without warning, leaving you scrambling for balance only to realize there was nothing to hold on to.

No steady ground.

No warning signs.

Just a sudden, sharp drop into uncertainty.

One second, life felt predictable; a steady and unshakable rhythm. A path stretching forward in a calm, certain direction. It was easy to believe it would always be that way, that the cycle was unbreakable—an endless loop of familiar faces, routines, and expectations. Days passing in a blur of normalcy, lulling you with the illusion of control.

Until one single moment shattered it all.

A single event, as quick as a breath, as devastating as a storm. Capable of unraveling everything you thought you knew. It didn’t have to be loud or catastrophic. Sometimes it was as subtle as a hushed whisper.

And then, all that was left was the aftermath.

The disoriented, breathless moment where you were forced to stand in the wreckage; looking around at the pieces of a life you no longer recognized, wondering ‘how the hell did I get here?’.

I kind of liked to see it as something beautiful in a tragic way, like the last embers of a fire burning just before being snuffed out. There was something about knowing everything was temporary that made the small moments feel sacred, like stolen glimpses of eternity wrapped in the ordinary, in the every day.

Maybe that was why I never took much for granted.

Why I found a strange kind of comfort in the knowledge that nothing lasted forever. The ticking clock above all of our heads—silent but ever-present, hanging like a guillotine—wasn’t just a reminder of the inevitable. It was a push, a force driving us together, urging us to stop wasting what little time we had.

It was the only thing that made sense in a world so prone to ripping things away without warning.

Greyson would probably accuse me of being a romantic, but I didn’t see it that way. I wasn’t naive enough to pretend fate was kind, nor did I believe everything happened for some grand, cosmic reason. I simply appreciated the delicate, fleeting nature of things—the raw beauty in knowing that nothing was ever promised no matter how hard you prayed.

Maybe that was what made life a little more bearable against the harsh tugs of reality. The understanding that even the worst moments would pass, just as the best ones always did.

I had a sixth sense for when those changes were coming.

Not in some supernatural, premonition-filled way, but in how my body always seemed to know before my mind could catch up. A shift in the air, subtle yet undeniable, like a storm rolling in before the first crack of thunder hit the shoreline. The unspoken energy of it prickling at the back of my neck, telling me something was coming.

I didn’t know what or when, but I felt it all the same.

I always did somehow.

At the time of my call with Wilder, I thought Pelly getting sick had been it.

It was the most obvious answer, after all.

I’d barely slept after crawling back into bed in the wee hours of that morning, filled with too much worry for my horse and what answers those tests would come back with; how permanently damaging this entire ordeal would be to not only her health but to her psyche, too. Every worst-case scenario played on repeat, feeding into my exhaustion but never letting me succumb to it.

She was a brilliant animal, and also a fragile one.

I hardly remembered falling asleep. By the time morning finally arrived, I’d woken up with a stiff back and a newly-formed text thread between Wilder and I with half a dozen messages already there waiting for me.

Each was an hour-by-hour update on how Pelly was doing, eventually ending with Wilder loading her back up into the horse trailer and taking her back to the ranch; a hefty bill in hand and a bag full of meds sitting on his passenger seat he’d texted a picture of to me.

Straightforward and to the point.

I appreciated the hell out of him for it.