The bay is at the back of his stall.
Not pressed against the wall like his first days—worse.
He’s moving. Circling.
Tight, frantic laps with his head high and his eyes showing white.
His hooves are hammering the shavings in a rhythm that sounds like his heartbeat externalized, and every time the thunder cracks he flinches hard enough to slam his hip into the stall boards.
Lee opens the stall door.
He steps in.
Slow, deliberate, making himself small.
The bay doesn’t register him—the horse is in full flight mode, trapped in a box, running from something he can’t outrun.
The circling tightens.
“Easy,” Lee says. Low. Almost inaudible under the rain. “Easy, boy. You’re all right. It’s just noise.”
The bay comes around another lap and I see the front left—the bad hoof, the one with the probable rotation—and my stomach drops.
He’s loading on it wrong, slamming it into the ground with every panicked stride, and if that coffin bone shifts any further he could go through the sole.
He could fracture.
He could end up on the ground in this stall and never get up.
“Lee,” I say. “His front left. He’s going to?—”
“I know.”
Lee moves.
Not toward the horse—he can’t intercept a twelve-hundred-pound animal in blind panic without getting killed.
He moves to the center of the stall and stands. Just stands.
The way he does every morning in that round pen.
Still. Open. A fixed point in the chaos, offering the horse something to orbit instead of the walls.
The bay circles.
Lee stands.
Thunder cracks again—a double strike, the barn lights cutting out for two full seconds before the generator kicks—and the bay lurches sideways. Hard.
Toward me.
Twelve hundred pounds of terrified horse, shoulder-first, slamming into the space between the stall wall and where I’m standing at the open door.
I see it happening—the massive body coming at me, the panicked eyes, the shoulder that’s going to pin me against the boards—and my feet won’t move because the adrenaline hits too fast and my brain is still three seconds behind my body.
Lee’s hand closes around my arm.
He pulls. Hard.
