Chapter 16
Foaling season does this to me every year, the days losing their edges, a rotating cast of mares deciding, apparently by committee, that the small hours of the morning were the correct time to need me most. I’d delivered three foals in five days by that point, on top of a full daytime slate of routine work, and I’d stopped, somewhere around day three, tracking meals with any real consistency, the way you stop tracking anything once survival mode quietly becomes the only mode running.
The third foal, a leggy chestnut colt out of a nervous first-time mother, had come in the middle of the Fenwick job, actually, both emergencies colliding at once, the way veterinary work occasionally insists on testing whether you can genuinely split yourself in two.
I’d left Marisol monitoring the mare’s early labor by phone while I finished the colic case, driven straight there with blood still on my sleeve from the other patient, and delivered the colt in a stall lit by nothing but a single bare bulb and my truck’s headlights angled through the open door, the owners, a nervous young couple on their first foal ever, hovering close enough that I’d had to ask them twice, gently, to give the mare a little more room to work.
It had gone well, the way most of them do when you don’t panic even when you’re running on fumes and a granola bar from six hours earlier.
The colt had found his feet within the hour, the mare had settled into the specific fierce, protective calm of a first-time mother who’s decided, against all her earlier nerves, that this particular small creature is now the only thing that matters.
I’d driven back to the clinic afterward with the windows down despite the cold, trying to shake off the accumulated exhaustion of two hard cases stacked on top of each other, and hadn’t thought once, in all of it, about when I’d last actually eaten.
The young couple had thanked me at the door, both of them still a little shell-shocked by the whole experience, the husband gripping my hand a beat too long, the wife crying openly and unashamed, and I’d told them what I tell every first-time owner in that exact state, that the fierce, protective terror they were both clearly feeling was actually the best possible sign, proof they were going to be exactly the kind of attentive owners a green colt needed.
I’d meant it, driving away, the way I always mean it.
But some tired, honest part of me, driving home with the windows down, also recognized the luxury of their fear: two people, wide awake at midnight over a wobbling colt, entirely undistracted by anything else in their lives competing for the same attention.
I didn’t notice I’d skipped lunch until nearly seven that evening, which happens more than I’d like to admit during foaling season, when the days stop having edges and just run together into one long procession of hooves and needles and coffee gone cold in the truck’s cup holder.
I came up the clinic stairs at the end of a fourteen-hour day light-headed in the way that means your body has stopped politely asking and started actually complaining, and found Grant sitting on the top step, waiting, a paper bag from the diner in town on the step beside him.
“You didn’t eat,” he said, not a question.
“How would you know that?”
“Marisol texted me around three. Said you’d gone straight through lunch into the Fenwick colic and hadn’t come up for air since.
” He held the bag out. “Turkey club, the one you actually like, not the one the diner thinks you like. Extra pickles, no tomato. And there’s a fridge dinner in the clinic kitchen too, for tomorrow, in case today happens again, because Marisol also mentioned you do this more than you’d probably admit if I asked you directly. ”
I stood on the step above him for a second, too tired and too hungry to do anything but take the bag and sit down before my legs made the decision for me.
Nobody had briefed him on how I take my sandwich.
Nobody had handed him a checklist of the specific, unglamorous ways I forget to take care of myself when a case runs long.
He had built that knowledge himself, the slow way, the only way it actually counts, by paying attention on ordinary days when nothing was being tested and no one was keeping score.
I unwrapped it right there on the step, too hungry to wait for a table or manners, and found he’d gotten every detail right, down to a pickle count I doubted I could have named myself if someone had asked me cold.
“You got the pickles right,” I said, around the first bite.
“I had excellent intelligence.”
“Marisol.”
“I’m not confirming a source under this kind of pressure.” He nudged my boot with his. “You’ve been standing on that hip funny since you got out of the truck. Bad delivery, or is that just fourteen hours of crouching finally catching up with you sideways?”
I hadn’t told him anything about the day beyond the fact that it had run long. “How did you even notice that?”
“I didn’t know it for a fact. I noticed you leaning on the rail funny walking up and made a guess.” He shrugged, unbothered at being caught guessing instead of knowing. “Was I right?”
“Annoyingly.”
“I’ll take annoying. Annoying means I’m paying attention and getting away with it.”
I found out later, needling Marisol about it the next morning, that Grant had texted her three separate times that week asking small clarifying questions he clearly didn’t want to bother me with directly: does she actually like the diner’s coleslaw or does she just not complain about it.
What’s her actual go-to order when she’s not being polite about it.
Is there a specific kind of chocolate she likes or should I not bother.
Marisol had answered every one, bemused, and told me, handing over that detail with the relish of someone delivering good gossip, that she’d never in eleven years fielded that many earnest questions from a man about a woman’s sandwich preferences.
“He also asked whether you actually like being surprised with food or whether it stresses you out, having to figure out how to react in front of someone,” Marisol added, clearly enjoying herself now.
“I told him you’re a terrible actress, Della, you can’t fake liking something you don’t, and if he got it wrong you’d tell him eventually whether you meant to or not.
He said, and I’m quoting directly, ‘good, that’s actually easier, I’ve never been very good at plausible deniability either.
’” She’d shaken her head at that, still bemused days later.
“I don’t know what’s happening over there, but I’ve never seen a man do this much homework for a sandwich in my entire career. ”
I thought about those three texts more than I probably should have, in the days after Marisol told me about them.
There was something almost unbearably tender in the specificity of it, a man who ran a company worth tens of millions of dollars, asking a veterinary technician, in careful, uncertain language, how to get a sandwich order right for a woman he was trying, one small unglamorous gesture at a time, to actually deserve again.
“You didn’t have to do this,” I said, sitting down next to him on the step, already unwrapping the sandwich because my hands had made that decision before the rest of me caught up.
“I know I didn’t have to.” He watched me eat for a second, then looked back out at the darkening lot, giving me the privacy of not being watched while I did something as unglamorous as being hungry. “I wanted to. There’s a difference, I’m told, between the two. I’m still learning it.”
It wasn’t the first time. Two days earlier, coming up too late for anything but the fridge dinner he’d mentioned, I’d found a container of chicken and rice, labeled in his handwriting, for whenever you get up here, not before, with a second, smaller note taped to the lid: Marisol says you like extra pepper.
I took a guess on how much “extra” means to you and probably got it wrong.
Correct me and I’ll fix it next time. I’d eaten it standing at the counter, alone, at nearly nine that night, and cried a little over it in a way that had nothing to do with the pepper, which he had, in fact, gotten wrong, too much by half, and which I’d finished anyway, all of it, because getting it wrong while still trying counted for more than getting it right by accident ever could have.
“The pepper,” I said, licking a bit of mustard off my thumb, mostly to see what he’d do with it. “Two nights ago. You want an honest review or a kind one?”
“Honest. Always honest, even when it costs me.” He said it lightly, but he meant it; I’d started being able to hear the difference.
“Too much. By half.”
He winced, more amused than wounded. “Noted. I was guessing at what ‘extra’ meant to you and overcorrected badly.”
“You did. I ate all of it anyway.”
“That’s either forgiveness or masochism.”
“It’s been a fourteen-hour day,” I said. “I don’t have the energy left to be picky about which.”
That got an actual laugh out of him, low and a little startled, like it had slipped past whatever he usually kept stationed between himself and being caught enjoying something.
We sat there while I ate, the evening going properly dark around us, barn sounds settling into their nighttime rhythms below, and somewhere in the middle of the sandwich, without deciding to, I let my head rest against his shoulder, just for a moment, just to see what it would feel like, and he went very still in the specific way of someone determined not to disturb a thing he desperately doesn’t want to end.
“You smell like a barn,” he said, not unkindly, more observation than complaint, his voice a low rumble under my ear.
“I smell like three barns. Possibly four, if you count the truck.” I didn’t lift my head. “You could say something else. Most men would say something else.”