Hands one to Bex, one to me.
His eyes move between us—the distance, the silence, the charged air—and he says nothing.
Just squeezes my shoulder and goes back to Grace.
The second hour is worse. Passage goes down twice. Both times we get her up—hauling on the halter, one of us on each side, the desperate coordinated effort of two people who know that a horse on the ground during colic is a horse that might not get up again.
The second time she goes down, I’m on my knees in the shavings with her head in my lap and Bex is bracing the hindquarters and our eyes meet across twelve hundred pounds of suffering animal and something passes between us that has nothing to do with the mare and everything to do with the fact that we are both people who will get on their knees in the dirt for a broken thing.
Grace says the word surgery around one.
Quietly, to me, while Bex walks the mare and Shadow stands with his arm around his wife because even the professional veneer cracks when you’re six months pregnant and exhausted and a horse you’ve been treating for eight months might be dying.
“If the oil doesn’t move things in the next hour, we need to talk about referral,” Grace says. Her voice is steady but her eyes are tired. “Equine surgical center in San Marcos. Three hours. It’s a lot to put her through. And the odds aren’t?—”
“We’re not there yet,” I say. “Give her the hour.”
Grace nods.
Shadow takes her inside to sit down for twenty minutes.
She argues.
He doesn’t budge.
They disappear into the house, and the barn goes quiet except for the mare’s hooves on the aisle and Bex’s voice, low and steady, talking the horse through another lap.
I take the lead from her.
Our fingers brush during the handoff.
Neither of us acknowledges it, but I feel it in my spine for the next ten minutes.
At bit after two, the mare’s gut sounds return.
I hear it through the stethoscope Grace left hanging on the stall door—the low, gurgling, beautiful music of a digestive system coming back online.
I press the bell to the mare’s right flank and close my eyes and listen to the sound of something that was dying deciding to live.
Bex hears it too.
She’s on the mare’s other side, her own stethoscope pressed to the left flank, and when the sound reaches her she drops her forehead against the mare’s barrel and exhales.
A long, shaky breath.
The sound of a woman who’s been holding herself together for four hours finally letting one piece go.
The mare lifts her head.
Not all the way—she’s exhausted, wrung out, but there’s something different in her eyes.
Less panic. Less pain.
She turns her head toward me and blows warm air against my chest.
A sigh.
I put my hand on her face. “There you go. There’s my girl.”
