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“Maureen, do you remember anything unusual about the day Will and Colt were born?”
“Virginia, get to the point.”
She waves her phone at my mother. “They were born on the first day after Daylight Savings Time ended. I mean, one of them was.”
“Okay,” Mother says.
Horse, Brian and Aiden have all pulled out their phones and are busy tapping.
Brian pushes me out of the way and looks at the both certificates. “Holy shit,” he mutters.
“Right?” Virginia replies, breaking into laughter again.
“What?!” Aiden, Horse and I all yell.
Virginia taps my birth certificate. “It says you were born at 1:30 AM. And that Colt was born at 1:52 AM PST.”
“Yeah, twenty-two minutes after me,” I say, confused.
“No, bro,” Brian says. “Yours doesn’t say PST. That means Colt was born …” His lips move silently. “Colt was born thirty-eight minutesbeforeyou!”
“Right?” Virginia repeats. “Am I right?”
“I think you’re right,” Brian says. “Holy shit. Holy shit.”
Then there’s silence and the penny drops. “I was never supposed to be Will Power.” I point at Horse. “You’re the fucking rightful Will Power. You sneaky baby bastard!”
“William Wallace Power!” Mother chastises.
“Not it!” I point at Horse, then I start to laugh with Virginia.
“Wait a minute,” Horse says, getting up in my face. “You stole my job? You stole all that fame from me? I should have been the one getting all the applause?” He gives me a hard, but friendly, punch in the chest. “You’re the sneaky baby bastard.”
“Colt Carter Power, enough!”
“I have no idea why you’re yelling at me,” Horse says. “My name is Will.”
The party takes an unexpected turn and I join everyone in drinking champagne. Virginia and I decide to spend the night in the city, something we don’t do often but makes sense given how much we’ve both had to drink.
Virginia is already in bed when I collapse beside her.
“How are you feeling?” she asks.
“A little tipsy, but not so much that I can’t perform.” I roll up on an elbow and move to straddle her.
She gives me a gentle nudge. “That’s not what I mean. Emotionally, how does it feel to know you wereneverthe one who wassupposedlycursed? That you don’t have a predetermined expiry date. And you never did.”
I scrub my beard—the one I’ve let grow since becoming a mountain man in Lily Valley.
“Do you feel different?” she asks.
“I don’t have an expiry date,” I repeat. “I don’t know yet. It’s strange to even consider. And maybe kind of maddening, too, that I spent all those years worrying about something that was never mine to worry about.”
“I don’t think that’s quite accurate. When I met you, you actually did have lots to worry about, Will. You really were living like a man who was doing everything in his power to be dead by forty-four.”
“Yeah, I guess that’s true. And as fucking amazing as the last year has been, and how well I sleep now, I’ve still been carrying around this, I don’t know, weight that it could all come crashing down any day.”
“Do you think now you might be able to put that weight down?” she asks.
