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Hey, you!

A beginning, a middle, and an end

Every story needs all three, and they seem to require very different parts of my storytelling brain to write. The beginning, middle, and "end" of a project also bring their own set of challenges. It occurred to me that I'm facing the beginning challenges of trying to fix into words people and a relationship who've taken shape solely in my head so far as I write book four of the Wild Ones series, As the Tallgrass Grows. Whereas I'm firmly in the middle of Night & Day, our mailing list serial (by the way, Chapter 7 is at the bottom of this email if you're looking for it!). And I'm tying everything together, I hope, for the ending of my secret novella project.

I'm going to keep it short this week, because in addition to all of that writing I have to do, I'm also in full, Release Week Chaos Mode. In case you missed it, Burning Season releases tomorrow, Tuesday, September 14. 🥰

Burning Season is about Dylan, a rancher's son coming of age in 1972, and Bo, the intriguing hitchhiker he meets while he's in Texas for a rodeo. Burning Season is book three in my Wild Ones series, and book one, Long Winter, is currently free. That makes it a great time to dive into the series if you haven't yet!

Live videos and giveaways with Allison Temple, Kelly Fox, and B. Harmony

To celebrate our new and forthcoming releases, I'll be joining up with some other authors over on Facebook. During the next week we'll be going live in one another's reader groups to talk about books and craft, answer audience questions, and give away some books!

I hope you'll join us over at Rachel's Party Barn and follow along.

Pre-Order Giveaway

There's still time to enter to win this prize box that includes bath salts, sandalwood soap, and signed copies of Long Winter and Signs of Spring! To enter, you just need to show proof you've pre-ordered Burning Season. A simple screenshot will do. Fill out the entry form now! There's just one more day before Burning Season releases and the giveaway closes.

Have a great week, and enjoy Burning Season!

xo,

Rachel

Website | Rachel's Party Barn on Facebook | Instagram | Discord

Books by Rachel Ember

Long Winter | Signs of Spring | Burning Season | As the Tallgrass Grows

Jaywalking | Sleepwalker

***

NIGHT & DAY

Chapter One | Chapter Two | Chapter Three | Chapter Four | Chapter Five | Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Isabel was up throughout the night, which was a welcome distraction. If Ty had been able to pace the house and dwell on the implications of his impulsive agreement to help Jonathan during the day as well as in the evening, he would have lost his mind. When she drifted off for the second time, Ty sensed she wouldn’t be out long, just based on the tight little frown she wore even in sleep. 

He was beginning to plan out what he needed to tell Jonathan in the morning when Emily called. He stepped into the bathroom to take the call, pulling the door most of the way closed to cut the noise while also ensuring he'd hear Isabel's first cries.

"Hey. Everything okay?"

Emily laughed quietly. "Do you answer everyone's calls that way, or just ours?"

By "ours," Ty knew she meant hers, Danielle's, and Sam's. "You guys are the only people who call me."

There was no laughter in her voice as she sighed and said, "I know. I'm sorry to bother you while you're at work, but I just wanted to ask if you'd heard from Danielle."

"No. Why? Is something wrong?" Panic tugged at his chest. All of his sisters had their challenging periods over the years, but for Danielle, her whole life seemed to be a struggle that he was constantly helping her through, and he worried about her even more than Sam.

"No, no," Emily said quickly. "I just talked to her about something, and I was wondering if she'd told you about it. That's all."

"No," Ty answered, torn between relief that he wasn't going to be the one to have Danielle's woes recited to him this time, guilt at feeling that way about Danielle when she could really be hurting, and a strange sort of jealousy that she'd gone to Emily and not him. "Can you tell me about it?"

"Not if she hasn't," Emily said, and Ty didn't press her further. Even though they were all siblings, they each had their own individual relationships, and Ty didn't feel entitled to any of their secrets any more than he wanted them to feel entitled to his.

Still, there had been something about Emily's tone in the question...an almost-studied casualness, maybe? But as a natural worrier, it was easy for his imagination to run away with him, so he tried not to let any real suspicion take hold.

"What about Sam? How's everything with her?" Emily went on. 

Ty told her a little about how Sam's semester was wrapping up. Emily exclaimed softly at the news that Sam was on track for straight A's again, then laughed at the story about her math teacher’s comment that, *Sam has a wonderful mind that is sometimes eclipsed by her short temper.*

"How are you doing?" he asked her then, and listened with a smile while she talked about school, so excited that she spoke faster the longer she went on, and was practically out of breath when she finally paused.

"Okay, now you."

Ty had been dreading the inevitable question. He'd never been great at lying, though he could do it if necessary. But Emily would see through it, and be mad that he'd even tried.

"I..."

"How's the nanny gig?" she prompted, like it had been the generality of the question that had tripped him up.

Ty cleared his throat. "Good."

"I'm really glad to hear that. Kent and I wondered—"

"I need to quit." He hadn't meant to interrupt, but the words just jumped out of his mouth.

"What? But you just said that it had been good!"

"It was." Ty thought about Jonathan's eyes on his, then slipping down to trace the lines of his body like there was something to admire about Ty's bony frame and pale skin. "It is." He thought of Jonathan's face turning shockingly radiant when he smiled. "But he needs someone all day, too, and I said yes, and obviously I shouldn't have. What about Sam?"

At that serendipitous moment, he heard the first wavering whimper from Isabel, the warning sign that she was about to go into full, angry baby mode if he didn't go pick her up immediately. He'd let his sisters cry sometimes in the middle of the night just for a minute or two, to see if they'd tucker themselves out and fall asleep, but he considered it part of his job to keep the house quiet enough that Jonathan could sleep..

"I've got to go," he murmured to Emily, hung up before she could argue, then went out into the dark hall, on quick, silent feet, and picked up Isabel.

She barked out a cry at him, and then another, so Ty slipped out the back door onto the stoop. She liked being outside at night—for whatever reason, it seemed to calm her. His phone vibrated in his pocket and he knew that his sister was furiously texting him, but he didn't even try to juggle the anxious baby and pulling out his phone. Besides, he knew what Emily would be saying, and he didn't want to hear it right now.

Had he really meant what he'd told her? He thought it over again as he held Isabel against his shoulder. She snuck a hand into his hair, and her little fingers wiggled against his scalp. Like being outside, burying her hand in his hair often seemed to calm her, as it did now. Her short cries trailed off into soft snuffling noises against his shoulder.

Ty wished he hadn't told Emily anything about his misgivings. He didn't need her worrying about him when she had school to think about.

Isabel's little hand formed a fist in his hair, and pulled hard enough to make his eyes water. Wincing, he walked her down the concrete steps into the small yard, which widened in the rear half, where Jonathan's lot was an irregular shape, subsuming the land behind the house adjacent so that it shared a property line at the very back of the lot with the townhouse two doors down.

As he paced in the short grass, Isabel groaning and squirming against him but blessedly quiet, at least, in the still night air, it was easy to hear a soft, vaguely familiar voice from the other side of the fence.

"So, it looks like you got that job."

Ty pivoted in surprise, Isabel protectively angled away from the spare, shadowy figure that was leaning against the other side of the fence. Hoodie, short hair, big eyes, sharp chin. He relaxed.

"Oh, hey." It was the neighbor he'd met on the day of his interview.

"Hey," the kid answered. Though, in the darkness, they didn't look quite as young as Ty had thought at first. The shadows caught at the unlined face and made Ty think they were his age, or older, instead.

"I'm Ty, by the way."

"Shay."

Ty nodded. "I'd shake your hand, but..." He jiggled Isabel a little, then exclaimed an "Ow!" when she jerked his hair again.

Shay smiled, a surprisingly sweet expression, at the sound of Ty in pain. Bemused, he hastily extricated his hair from Isabel's grasp and turned her around so she was facing out from his body and could see Shay, too.

Shay's smile faded quickly. "So, how do you know so much about babies, when you're just a kid?"

Ty was amused to be called a kid by someone he'd been thinking of as a kid inside his head, and wondered again how old Shay was. He kept second guessing his assumptions, like looking at a chameleon and trying to name its color. "Three sisters," he offered by way of explanation.

Shay winced. "That sounds awful. Was it awful?"

Startled, Ty laughed and shook his head. "No.” He added wistfully, "I miss them being little. They were so much work, but I felt so close to them. They needed me so much, you know?"

He didn't get an answer. He had a feeling Emily would have gently told him that this was one of those times when he volunteered a little too much information, especially to someone he’d just met. Shay's face fell into the shadow of the gaping hood of the oversized sweatshirt that looked just like the one Ty had seen them wearing that first day.

Ty's phone started ringing in his pocket again. He grimaced, but Isabel seemed to have settled down enough to venture back indoors, where he could set her down for a second, check his phone, and make sure he wasn't ignoring texts about a house fire or something. Just the passing thought made his worry spike, imagining Sam standing at the Quik Trip and waiting for him to answer.

"I'd better get back in," he said to Shay, already walking toward the back door. "Nice seeing you again."

He didn’t hear an answer as he quickly went up the back steps and into the house, which was dark and silent, into the nursery, where he placed the baby on her back on the play mat, rubbing her tummy while he spent a few seconds scrolling his notifications to confirm there hadn't been a calamity, only lots of emojis and interrobangs from Emily.

It was another two hours before Isabel finally fell asleep, a boneless, slack-mouthed stupor that Ty tentatively hoped would last until morning. He tiptoed as quietly as he could out of the nursery, afraid to so much as breathe in her presence, like she'd sense it and her closed eyes would open, and soon she'd be snuffling and building up to a big wail.

That left him on the wrong side of the door from the daybed that he'd been napping on occasionally. He recalled Jonathan's offer of the guest room—and then the rest of what Ty had agreed to crashed back down over him, in all its impossible glory.

He could not be away from his house twenty-four hours a day while Sam was still living there.

Still, he found himself too curious to resist walking down the hall, not quite to the firmly closed door to Jonathan's bedroom, where his eyes lingered for a few long seconds, like the pattern of the shadows over the paneling could give him insight into the room beyond. Where he imagined Jonathan sleep-soft and vulnerable, until his eyes stung, for some reason he couldn't explain, and there was a lump in his throat.

Longing, but for what? What he felt for Jonathan wasn’t even lust, exactly. At least, not all the time. Lusting after him felt strange...he was so far outside Ty’s league, not someone Ty would presume to touch or be touched by, even in fantasy. Ty's yearning was much more general, the way as a child he'd yearned for beautiful sculptures spun from glass or a cottage in a storybook grown over with blooming ivy. The nonspecific longing for something that he didn’t entirely understand.

He finally forced his attention away from Jonathan's room, and walked through the open door into the guest room.

It wasn't extravagant. Just a bed, nightstands, dresser, and a library table with a lamp. But there was a door in the corner that led to an ensuite bathroom, and the entire space was roughly six times what the furniture would have required. It gave the space a feeling of quiet luxury even with the understated furniture and bare walls.

Unable to go past the doorway, for some reason, Ty slid down to the floor to sit with his back resting against the door frame and got his phone out again.

Regretting letting his situation slip to Emily all over again, he typed out an answer to her.

The girls always teased him about his dad sayings, and mostly he laughed along with them, but he always wondered what they would think if they knew the truth. That he’d picked up on little turns of phrase and tips on how to talk to his sisters about certain things from books and TV shows. From what he'd overheard from friends' and classmates' fathers over the years. A little bit from his own imagination of what it meant to take care of someone the way he'd always wanted to be taken care of, the way that he'd wanted to be made to feel safe and protected, a feeling he'd long been determined his sister wouldn't miss out on.

He didn't like lying, and his sisters usually knew when he was doing it. But all his years of observation and practice had taught him that there were ways to reassure without saying everything was fine, or that he had it under control, two things that were never true.

So his thumbs slid over the phone screen as he messaged Emily back. Don't worry about me. I'm figuring it all out.