The filly doesn’t flinch.
“Hey, sweet girl,” Bex murmurs. “Let me see what we’re working with.”
She bends.
Runs her hand down the left front cannon bone, squeezes the tendon gently, and the filly picks up the hoof.
Automatic.
Like Bex asked a question in a language the horse already spoke.
That’s when the ghost walks in.
The way Bex positions herself—turned at the hip, the hoof braced on her thigh, her left hand stabilizing the leg while her right inspects the sole.
The angle of her body.
The steadiness of her base.
The way she holds the hoof like it’s something valuable, something worth paying attention to.
I know that technique.
I know it like I know my own name because I’ve seen it a hundred times in this exact posture, in barns just like this one, taught by the same weathered hands.
Earl’s technique. Earl’s foundation.
The same way he taught two girls to stand under a horse twenty years ago, patient and precise, correcting their grip, adjusting their stance, making them do it again and again until muscle memory replaced thought.
For one disorienting second, I’m not in this barn.
I’m in Earl’s barn, and the woman under the horse has blonde hair instead of black, and she’s laughing about something because she always laughed when she was learning, said it was the only way to survive her father’s perfectionism?—
But it’s not Rose’s hands on the hoof.
Rose’s hands were slim. Pale. Delicate fingers with nails she actually maintained, even when she was working in the barn.
Piano hands, Earl used to say. Too pretty for this work.
These hands are broader. Darker.
Sun-browned and scarred at the knuckles, calloused across the palms in the specific pattern of someone who grips a rasp for hours every day.
When Bex curls her fingers around the hoof pick, there’s a sureness to it that Rose never built—not because she couldn’t have, but because her back gave out before she got the chance.
She stopped. Bex kept going.
And the difference shows in every confident movement, every efficient angle, every competent flex of those strong, capable hands.
I see the ghost in the technique, but the woman is entirely someone else.
The black hair in a braid, catching the barn light.
The width of her shoulders under the work shirt.
The curve of her hips under the leather apron—full, round, nothing like Rose’s narrow frame.
The way she takes up space without apology, without the slight self-consciousness that Rose always carried, as if Bex decided a long time ago that the world was going to have to make room for her because she wasn’t going to shrink.
