Chapter 16
Chapter Sixteen
TOM
The call comes at four in the afternoon.
‘Tom,’ Jack Penrose, says, tightness in his tone – a tightness I’ve learned to read the way I read vitals: elevated, strained, close to breaking. ‘The mare’s in labour. She’s been at it for hours and nothing’s coming.’
‘I’m on my way.’
I’m already grabbing my bag, already running through differentials in my head – malpresentation, uterine inertia, the foal stuck at the shoulder. The body knows the drill before the brain finishes processing. Cara appears in the surgery doorway, my car keys in hand.
‘Emergency?’
‘Foaling gone wrong up at the Penrose farm.’
‘I’m coming.’
I don’t argue. There isn’t time, and besides – she’s good. I’ve seen her work. If this goes sideways, I’ll want her hands.
We take the Land Rover up the coast road, hedgerows blurring past. Cara’s already asking the right questions – how long in labour, first-time mother, any previous complications – and her voice has shifted into the clinical register I remember from third year, when she’d walk into a practical and everything else fell away.
This is the Cara I knew first. The vet. The colleague.
The person I understood before things got complicated.
‘First-time mother,’ I tell her. ‘Three years old. Jack says he’s never seen her this distressed.’
‘Malpresentation?’
‘That’s my guess.’
Penrose Farm sits in a valley two miles from the village, surrounded by fields that slope to the sea. Jack meets us at the gate, face ashen, and leads us to the stable without a word, just shaking his head.
The mare is down. Flanks heaving, eyes rolling white, her body trembling with an exhaustion I can measure by the intervals between contractions – too far apart, too weak.
She’s been fighting this for hours. The sweat has darkened her coat to the colour of wet earth and her legs scrabble against the straw in movements that are becoming less coordinated.
She’s running out of time. They both are.
‘Easy, girl.’ I crouch beside her, running my hands along her belly, feeling for position. My voice is low, steady, the frequency that large animals respond to, the one I learned from Dad. ‘Easy. We’re going to help you.’
Cara’s already gloved, already setting up. We work in the shorthand of shared training – a nod, a gesture, with the economy of two people who learned the same language in the same rooms.
‘Leg’s back,’ I say, once I’ve examined her. ‘Foal’s stuck at the shoulder. I need to reposition.’
‘Tell me what you need.’
‘Keep her calm. Talk to her. Don’t let her thrash.’
The next twenty minutes are the hardest kind.
The mare screams – a sound I’ve heard a hundred times and never learned to separate from – and Cara holds her head, murmuring steadily, her hands firm and gentle, keeping the animal still while I work blind.
My arms are burning. Sweat drips into my eyes.
The foal is wedged tight, and every second that passes is another second of oxygen deprivation, another second closer to losing them both, and the part of my brain that stays clinical is shrinking while the part that just feels it is getting louder.
Come on. Move. Turn. Let go of whatever you’re holding on to and come towards me.
The leg shifts. I feel the foal turn with the slow, grinding rotation of a body finally giving way. My relief is so immediate it’s almost nauseous.
‘Now. She needs to push now.’
The mare heaves. Cara presses her hands against the belly, adding pressure, and with a rush of fluid and a sound like the world exhaling, the foal slides free.
It’s not breathing.
I clear its airways. Rub its sides, hard, rhythmic. Cara is beside me, doing the same. The straw is wet and warm and the stable is silent except for our breathing and the mare’s ragged panting and the absence of the sound we need to hear.
Then the foal shudders. Gasps. Its legs kick; weak, uncoordinated, entirely alive.
‘There you go.’ My voice is wrecked. ‘There you go. Good girl.’
The mare lifts her head, nickering, and the foal turns towards the sound.
Alive. Both of them alive. The foal’s legs are folding and unfolding.
newly assembled mechanics, testing the joints, and the mare is already nuzzling it with the blind devotion of a mother who has never done this before and knows exactly what to do.
Jack Penrose is crying. He doesn’t try to hide it. I don’t judge him for it. My own hands are shaking.
‘Thank you,’ he says. ‘Christ. Thank you both.’
The drive back is quiet, but it’s a good quiet. My brain is humming.
Cara’s looking out the window, her profile lit by the low evening sun.
‘That was good work,’ she says. ‘The repositioning. I’ve seen senior vets lose it with less.’
‘I’ve had practice.’
‘You were calm. Even when it looked like we’d lose them.’ She turns to me. ‘You’re really good at this, Tom.’
‘So are you. Wouldn’t have managed alone.’
‘We make a good team.’
The words sit in the car. I keep my eyes on the road.
‘We do,’ I say, and it’s true. We really do. But the part of today that was Cara and me, working together, saving an animal – that was real and good and uncomplicated, and I just wish the rest of it were that simple.
I sigh, letting it drift out of the open window, up into the Cornish sky.
‘I meant what I said. About the practice.’ She’s watching me. ‘I think we could build something that matters, and this is nothing about what happened at the wedding, who we used to be to one another, back in the day.’ She flashes me a smile. ‘This is about today and the future.’
‘Cara—’
‘You don’t have to answer now.’
I pull into the surgery car park, around the back from the harbour.
Cara unbuckles her seatbelt but doesn’t move to get out.
‘Tom.’
‘Yeah?’
She leans across the console and kisses me.
Her mouth is warm. Certain. Her hand comes up to cup my jaw, fingers along my cheekbone, her thumb at the corner of my mouth. She kisses me directly, without apology, with the full weight of a woman who has decided what she wants.
I don’t kiss her back.
But my body takes a breath, an involuntary lean, the mechanical response of a man whose nerve endings don’t care about the difference between wanted and needed. For three seconds, maybe four, I am just a body responding to warmth and pressure and the simple human fact of being chosen.
Then my brain catches up.
I pull back. Not sharply, but just enough. My hand on the gear stick. My breath unsteady.
Cara reads my face. She doesn’t look surprised. She looks like a woman who has planned for every outcome and is working with the one she expected.
‘Just think about it,’ she says. ‘That’s all I’m asking.’
She gets out of the car and walks into the surgery. I sit with my hands on the steering wheel and the warmth of her mouth fading from mine, along with the specific, unbearable knowledge that I felt nothing.
Not nothing. Warmth. Comfort. The pleasant pressure of being wanted by someone good. But underneath the warmth, underneath the comfort – the same hollow I’ve been carrying.
I wipe my mouth. I go inside. I shower. I don’t look out the window at the café.
Brynn and Jude’s place is the old Trelawney cottage, up and away from the village, which they are slowly rebuilding – low ceilings, mismatched furniture, the permanent smell of whatever Jude is attempting for dinner. Tonight it’s garlic. A lot of garlic. The windows are steamed.
Nina’s already there when we arrive.
She’s in the kitchen helping Brynn, laughing at whatever Brynn’s just said, sleeves pushed up, bangles sliding down her wrists. She looks up when I walk in and smiles.
Then her eyes move past me to Cara, and the smile stays but the warmth leaves it. A fractional shift. A door closing behind a window that’s still lit.
I see it. I file it.
‘There they are,’ Brynn says, waving a wooden spoon. ‘The heroes of Penrose Farm. Jack’s been calling everyone. You two saved his prize mare.’
‘Tom did the hard work,’ Cara says. ‘I just held things steady.’
‘Teamwork,’ Brynn says. ‘Love it. Sit. Jude’s made sangria and it’s either delicious or a health risk.’
We sit. Cara takes the seat next to me, her thigh pressing against mine under the table. Across from us, Nina settles beside Brynn. The table is small enough that our feet nearly touch underneath it.
Jude emerges from the stove with a dish. ‘Experimental paella. No judgements.’
‘I’m already judging,’ Brynn says.
‘You’re always judging. It’s your whole personality.’
‘And yet you love me.’
‘Inexplicably, yes.’
The food is better than expected. The conversation flows – Brynn on a mechanical repair job she freelanced in Newquay, Jude on a chef two villages across who thinks he’s Gordon Ramsay, Nina on Dot’s latest campaign against a tourist who tried to haggle over a postcard.
This is the rhythm of it, the easy village shorthand, and I watch Nina tell the story – the way she builds to the punchline, the way her hands conduct the narrative, the way she turns to me at the crucial moment for confirmation because I was there and she wants the corroboration.
‘Tom, back me up. Did Dot actually say, “This isn’t a souk”?’
‘She said, “This isn’t a souk and I am not open to negotiation.” Direct quote. I was buying milk.’
‘She said it in front of children, guys. Small children. Who now think a souk is a swear word.’
‘It is, the way Dot uses it.’
Nina grins. I grin back. The ease of it – the automatic, thoughtless ease – is so familiar it aches.
Cara’s hand lands on my forearm.
I feel it arrive: warm, deliberate, her fingers curling around my wrist. And I feel Nina’s eyes track the movement – a flicker, barely perceptible, the way her gaze drops to Cara’s hand on my arm and then lifts back to my face. She picks up her glass. Takes a sip. Looks at Brynn.
But I saw it. The half-second where her eyes went to Cara’s fingers on my skin and her jaw tightened.
‘So,’ Cara says, leaning into me, her chin close to my shoulder. ‘I found something interesting today, before the drama with the foal.’
‘Research?’ Brynn raises an eyebrow.