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Josie packed the kit.

Nickel went to his stall, drank, and started banging his bucket against the wall with his nose.

Everyone was calm.

I stood in the alley with my phone in my hand and four photographs on it and my heart going like something trapped, and I could not work out where to put any of it.

***

I called the county at seven-forty. It rang four times and went to the machine, which meant the office didn’t open until eight, which I knew.

“Mrs. Fry, this is Priya Nair at Carrow Creek. I’m reporting an incident. A horse sustained a laceration from an arena panel this morning at approximately five-forty-five. Treated on site, four sutures, no complications. I’m documenting it and I’d like to confirm our panel specifications remain compliant. I’ll follow up in writing.”

I hung up.

I stood in the bunkhouse with the phone in my hand and listened to what I’d just said out loud into a county answering machine, at seven-forty in the morning, about a horse who was currently banging his bucket against a wall.

Then I sat down and got out a clean sheet of paper.

The report was two-thirds done when the door opened.

I’d started it in my right hand out of habit and the grip had failed on the third line — the wrist buckling, the pen skating across the page and drawing a dark line through review — so I’d switched to my left, and the letters were coming out slanted and uneven, and I was still writing.

Cash had been sitting across from me for ten minutes. He’d brought two mugs. He hadn’t picked up the report and he hadn’t asked about the voicemail I’d left for Dena Fry, and he hadn’t said anything at all, which was a thing he’d started doing that I hadn’t decided how to feel about.

Josie came in with the vet kit on her shoulder, on her way to somewhere else.

She stopped at the table.

She looked at the report. At the photographs still open on my phone. At my right hand lying on the wood beside the page with the fingers curled because they’d stopped working an hour ago.

Then she looked at me, and her face changed, and I understood that she had arrived somewhere I hadn’t expected anyone to go.

Cash wandered out of the room, and Josie took a step closer.

“Priya.” Her voice was very level and very low. “Is Cash treating you all right?”

The question went through me like cold water.

I understood it completely and instantly. Not the words — the shape underneath them. A woman shaking at a table. A man sitting across from her, saying nothing. A written record of a small thing, made in a hand that wouldn’t hold the pen.

She had been in a kitchen like this. She had been the woman at the table.

“No,” I said. “No — God, no. It isn’t him.”

Josie didn’t move.

“It’s not him,” I said again. “He’s the—” My hands were flat on the table now, both of them, and I heard how fast I was talking. “He makes me eat. He helps me sleep. It isn’t him, Josie, it’s not—”

“Okay.”

“It’s something that happened in Denver.”

The word came out of me before I’d agreed to it, and then I stopped, because the next part had nowhere to go. I could see it, whole and complete, the way I’d seen it every day for two years. I opened my mouth. Nothing arrived. I tried again and my throat closed around it.

“I can’t,” I said.

Josie nodded. Once.