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It’s the first time he’s said it. It lands strangely. Not like a request. Like a fact he wants on the table.

“That doesn’t open the door,” I say.

“No. It doesn’t.”

I stay there. So does he. At some point I catch myself listening to him breathe the way I listen to a patient, counting. The rhythm is slow and even and doesn’t change. I have stopped being afraid of it.

That frightens me more than the lock does.

I must doze, sitting there against the door, because the next thing I know the hall is quiet and there’s a voice outside my window.

His voice. Low. Talking to the cow.

“Easy, mama. Easy. I know. She’s asleep. I’m just going to check you. You can kick me if you want. I probably deserve it.”

I get up and go to the six-inch gap. In the shed light, he’s crouched beside 14C with the thermometer in one hand and his other hand flat on her side, and he’s talking to her the whole time, quiet and steady, like you’d talk to a scared kid.

She kicks him. Not hard. He grunts and says, “Fair,” and writes the number on his sheet in block letters.

I stand at the window with my arms wrapped around myself and watch him do the one thing I asked him to do, exactly right, when he thinks nobody can see.

I don’t know what to do with a man like that. I don’t know what to do with the fact that I want to know.

* * *

At four-thirty, he knocks, says my name, and asks if I want to check her. I say yes. He opens the door. He’s standing, not sitting, like the last three hours didn’t happen. His eyes go to my face and stay there a second too long.

Neither of us mentions the floor.

The cow is holding. Temperature normal. Breathing faster than I like, but her gums have color again. When I finish, he walks me back and closes the door and locks it, and I hear the click and the scrape, and I stand in the middle of the room shaking with something that isn’t cold.

At five-fifteen, I try the window.

I’ve been thinking about it since ten. The steel stop is bolted to the frame, but the frame is old pine, soft with years of weather. The screen is riveted, but the rivets go into aluminum channel, and aluminum bends. I have a hoof pick in my medical bag and a forty-minute gap before his next check.

I work the pick under the channel and lever. It gives a quarter inch. I do it again at the next rivet. My hands are slick. My heart is hammering so loud I’m sure he can hear it through the wall.

The third rivet pops with a small metallic tick.

I freeze.

Nothing. The shed is quiet. 14C shifts her weight.

I start on the fourth.

“Sofia.”

His voice comes from right outside the window. Not loud. Not angry. I look up, and he’s standing six feet away in the gray light, hands at his sides, empty. He must have been there the whole time.

I don’t stop. I lever harder. The pick slips and skins my knuckle.

“There’s a man with a rifle somewhere in that brush,” he says quietly. “I haven’t found him yet. If you go out that window, you go out on the side where he shot from.”

“So you say.”

“So I say.”

I look at him through the six-inch gap. He looks back. He doesn’t move toward me. He doesn’t tell me to stop. He doesn’t threaten anything.