9. Gracie
— ? —
Gracie
The pig is judging me.
I mean, technically, Hamlet judges everyone, it’s his entire personality, but right now he’s standing six inches from my left boot, his little hooves planted in the mud like he’s a foreman on a construction site, watching me palpate a pregnant goat with the kind of intense skepticism usually reserved for used car salesmen.
“She’s fine,” I tell him. “Twins, probably. Maybe triplets. We’ll know in a month.”
Hamlet snorts.
“I don’t care if you don’t believe me. I went to school for this.”
Rosie Salazar, who’s five years old and has been following me around the farm for three weeks like I’m the most interesting thing she’s ever seen, tugs on my sleeve. “Dr. Gracie?”
“Yeah, honey?”
“Do goats dream?”
I move my hands along the doe’s flank, feeling for position. “I don’t know. I think so. Dogs dream - you can see them twitching in their sleep, chasing rabbits. Goats probably do too.”
“What do they dream about?”
“Grass, maybe, or running, or other goats.”
“Do they have nightmares?”
I look down at her. She’s got her mother’s dark curls and her father’s serious eyes, and she asks questions like she’s compiling a research database. “Sometimes, probably. Why?”
“Because Hamlet has nightmares.” She says it matter-of-factly. “He sleeps in my room and sometimes he makes little screaming noises and kicks his legs.”
“Pigs don’t-” I stop. Reframe. “Maybe he does. Maybe he dreams about being chased.”
“By what?”
“I don’t know. Wolves?”
Rosie considers this. “We don’t have wolves.”
“Maybe that’s why they’re nightmares. Things that don’t make sense.”
She nods, satisfied, and goes back to watching me work. Hamlet, apparently offended that we’ve been discussing his private sleep life, stalks off to supervise the chickens instead.
I finish the goat exam and make a note in my chart, Buttercup, 6 weeks, twins probable, good body condition, and move to the next pen.
The Salazar farm is small but immaculate, every fence mended, every water trough clean.
Rafael runs it like a military operation, and Bree runs Rafael like a benevolent dictator who knows exactly how much rope to give before she yanks.
Speak of the devil.
“Dr. Tate.” Rafael appears at my elbow, holding a three-ring binder stuffed with laminated pages. “I have some questions about the northeast pasture rotation.”
“Hit me.”
He flips to a section tabbed with green sticky notes. There are charts. Color-coded charts. “So as you can see, I’ve been tracking the protein content of the forage in each quadrant, and I’m concerned that the June grazing depleted the-”
“Rafael.” Bree’s voice cuts across the barn like a thrown knife. “Step away from the vet.”
“I’m asking about pasture nutrition.”
“You’re asking about pasture nutrition with a binder that has tabs. That woman has actual medical work to do.”
“This IS medical work. Preventative.”
Bree emerges from the tack room, crosses the barn floor in four strides, and grabs her husband by the back of his collar. “We talked about this. The binder is a sometimes food.”
“That doesn’t even make sense.”
“And yet.” She starts towing him toward the door. “Come help me move the hay. You can tell me about your charts while we lift heavy things.”
Rafael looks over his shoulder at me, mournful. “Page thirty-seven. Just look at page thirty-seven.”
“I’ll read it tonight,” I promise.
Bree gives me a thumbs-up and drags him out into the sunlight, and I’m left alone with the goats and Rosie and the warm smell of hay and manure and clean animal.
I lean against the fence rail and close my eyes, just for a second.
This is good, exactly what I needed, work that matters, animals that don’t care about openings or reviews, a family that’s absorbed me into their orbit like I’ve always been here.
I’ve been at the Salazar farm for three weeks, and I’ve already put down deposits on two Salazar heifers and a young bull calf for my own place. Building, finally.
I open my eyes and the world tilts.
Not dramatically, just a soft gray wave at the edges of my vision, a sudden cold sweat at my hairline. I’ve been off all week. Tired even when I sleep eight hours. Queasy in the mornings, blaming the heat, blaming the adjustment, blaming the stress of rebuilding a life from scratch.
“Dr. Gracie?” Rosie’s voice sounds far away. “You look weird.”
“I’m okay, honey. Just need to-”
The gray wave crests, and I sit down hard on an overturned bucket.
“I’m going to get Mommy,” Rosie announces, and disappears.
I put my head between my knees and breathe, in and out. The smell of hay and goat and summer, in and out. The distant sound of chickens complaining, probably about Hamlet, and Hamlet complaining back.
“Up.” Bree’s voice, and then her hands under my elbows, lifting. “Kitchen. Now.”
“I’m fine-”
“You’re gray. Like, actually gray. Like a corpse in a movie. Kitchen.”
She steers me across the yard and through the back door, deposits me in a chair at the big wooden table, and puts a glass of water in front of me. I drink it. She watches me drink it. Then she disappears down the hall.
When she comes back, she’s holding a pharmacy bag.
“Bree-”
“No questions.” She sets the bag on the table. “Bathroom’s down the hall, second door on the left. Take your time.”
I look at the bag. Then at her.
“How did you-”
“I have eyes.” She shrugs. “And I’ve been pregnant twice. You’ve got the look. The tired-but-can’t-sleep look. The queasy-at-random-times look. The checking-the-calendar-in-your-head-every-five-minutes look.”
I take the bag.
The bathroom is small and clean, yellow tiles and a framed print of a rooster that Rosie probably picked out. I lock the door and sit on the closed toilet lid and take the test out of the box and don’t let myself think.
Three minutes.
I count the tiles on the floor and get twenty-seven, then count them again and get twenty-seven.
I pick up the test.
Two pink lines.
I sit on the bathroom floor of another woman’s house, back against the tub, and I start to cry.
The whole story comes out of me when Bree knocks, quietly, not pushing, and I open the door and she sees my face and lowers herself to the tile across from me, cross-legged, like we’ve known each other twenty years instead of three weeks.
“The city,” I manage. “The gallery shows and the champagne and the critics and everyone wanting a piece of him. He painted her. His ex. Six months of secret sessions. He never told me.”
Bree listens.
“Odette. That’s her name. She’s everything I’m not - silk dresses and perfect nails and she knows all the right people, says all the right things. She called me his starter wife at a party. To my face. And he wasn’t there. He was across the room, talking to a collector, and he didn’t even see.”
Bree nods.
“I came to the studio to tell him I was leaving, and she was there. In his shirt. On his couch. Barefoot. Looking at me like I was the intruder.”
“Was she?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. I don’t think he cheated, but - does it matter? He left anyway. Not physically. Just-” I press the heels of my hands into my eyes. “A little at a time. Year by year. And I let him. I kept forgiving and forgiving until there was nothing left.”
“Where’s he now?”
“I blocked him. Took five months. I’m going to decide at the end whether to file.” I drop my hands and look at her. “And now I’m pregnant and I don’t know what to do.”
Bree is quiet for a long moment. The bathroom is very still, just the two of us on the yellow tile, the rooster print watching from the wall.
“I’m not going to tell you to go back or to burn it down,” she says finally. “That’s your call. But if you ever want him back - if that’s the road you choose - you make him earn it. Every inch. Every single inch.”
“How?”
“He shows up. He does the work. He proves, every day, that he sees you now. The you that’s sitting on my bathroom floor, covered in goat hair, building a new life, and not whatever version of you he remembers or took for granted. That you.”
I drag my sleeve across my face. “What if he can’t?”
“Then you’ll know. And you’ll be okay anyway. You’ve already survived leaving. Surviving alone is the easy part after that.” Bree tilts her head. “Mine did it, by the way. Earned it. It’s the only reason the marriage worked. I’ll give you tips.”
I laugh.
It comes out wet and cracked, the shape of a laugh more than a laugh, and Bree grins at me, and my hand moves without thinking to rest on my stomach.
Two pink lines.
A whole new math.