Grace comes back.
She checks everything twice.
Confirms: gut sounds bilateral, pulse coming down, the displacement is resolving.
The mineral oil did its work.
The mare needs monitoring through the night but the crisis is passing.
“She needs someone to stay,” Grace says. Looking at me, then at Bex. Choosing her words. “Check vitals every hour. Walk her if she gets restless. No feed until morning. I’ll come back at dawn.”
Shadow’s hand is on Grace’s back.
The protective hover of a man who’s been watching his pregnant wife work through the night and has reached his limit.
Grace leans into him without thinking about it—the automatic, unconscious lean of a woman who trusts the body beside her to hold her up.
“Go,” I say. “We’ve got her.”
We.
The word comes out before I can stop it. Not I. We.
Grace looks at me.
Something soft in her eyes.
Something knowing.
She nods, squeezes Bex’s arm on the way past, and lets Shadow guide her out of the barn.
The barn door closes.
And it’s just us. Me and Bex and a gray mare who almost died and the silence that sits differently than any other kind of silence in the world.
We don’t talk at first.
The mare settles in her stall, standing but resting, one hind leg cocked, head low.
I check her vitals around three.
Everything is stable. Gut sounds active, her pulse is fine.
The IV bag is nearly empty.
I sit on the floor outside the stall with my back against the wall and my legs stretched out in the aisle and every muscle in my body announcing that four hours of walking a colicking horse is for young men, not for me.
Bex sits beside me.
Not across the aisle.
Beside me.
Shoulder to shoulder, backs against the same wall, legs extended parallel, close enough that I can feel the heat of her body through the fabric between us.
She sits down like it’s the most natural thing in the world, like there was never any other place she was going to sit, and I don’t move away because I’m too tired.
Because the walls I’ve been maintaining for a week require energy I don’t have left.
