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I built a business so no man could lock me out of my own work, and a man has locked me in instead, and the most frightening thing in the world right now is that he isn’t here.
At two-fourteen, 14C folds onto her chest in the shed.
I’m at the window in one step. Her breathing is wrong. Too fast. Her head is low.
I grab the radio. “Cole. I need you back now.”
He doesn’t answer with words. I hear the engine before I hear anything else, and the truck comes down that hill faster than I’ve seen anyone drive on caliche, and he’s out of the cab and at my door before the dust behind him settles.
The lock turns. He doesn’t knock. He doesn’t say my name first.
His face is white.
“She’s down,” I say, pushing past him with my bag. “Clean water from the blue container. My treatment kit. The halter. Don’t make her stand.”
He brings each thing in the order I say it. I check every label and seal before I draw anything, because Warren Vale was here yesterday and I don’t trust a bottle I didn’t open myself.
“Time,” I say.
“Two twenty-one.”
I start the treatment. Then I take his hand and put it flat against the cow’s shoulder. His palm is hot and rough.
“Steady pressure. If she tries to rise, let go and step back. You’re support, not a wall.”
He goes still under my hand. For a second neither of us moves, my hand on top of his on the cow’s warm hide, and something passes through him, a tremor almost too small to name.
I take my hand back.
We wait. Ten minutes of hard breathing while flies find the wet edge of the tub and heat builds under the tin roof. The cow’s color comes back first. Then her breathing eases. Then she drinks without being asked.
I sit back on my heels. My hands are shaking now that they’re allowed to.
“You broke rule one,” I say.
“I know.”
“You didn’t knock.”
“I know.”
“Good,” I say. “Don’t ever knock when she’s down.”
He looks at me across the cow’s broad back. Then he nods, once, like I’ve handed him something he’s going to keep.
* * *
He tells me what he found at the repeater while I finish the record. Russell’s key opened the old family channel twice. Once for the message ordering him to hold me. Once for the voice ordering him to burn the certificate. Neither went through Garrett’s current system.
“So you know it was Russell,” I say.
“I know it was Russell’s key.”
The distinction is mine. He learned it from me. It should please me more than it does.
“Then call Garrett.”
His jaw moves. “Garrett’s in Fort Worth with the lenders. The old channel doesn’t reach him. The new one needs a device I left at headquarters so nobody could track where we are.”
