Page 60 of The Reckless Rookie

I drive toward the barn the way I’ve driven toward that ranch every night for months. Foot down, windows open, the dark coming up to meet me.

Hold on, girl. I’m coming. I did what you taught me. I stayed calm, and I lost the game and I’m coming.

Just hold on till I get there.

Chapter thirty-four

Catalina

Bonita goes into labor at nine, and I know inside two minutes it’s the bad kind, because she won’t lie down.

A mare foaling drops. Gets down in the straw and gets to the work of it, hard and fast and mostly done inside a half hour, because a body built to be prey can’t afford a long birth. Bonita won’t go down. She’s up and circling and kicking at her own belly the way she did the day she colicked, lathered along the neck, and when I get a hand on her, she swings her head around with the white showing at the edge of her eye, and I know. Something’s wrong in her, and it’s wrong in the way that doesn’t wait for morning.

I call Salinas and he’s forty minutes out. I call Vicente and he’s four, because he’s always four, twenty years of always four, and he comes across the dark in his undershirt with a coat thrown over it and takes one look at her and his face does what I’ve watched it do exactly twice in twenty years.

“Breech.” Not a question. He’s already rolling his sleeves. “She’s trying to push it and it won’t come, and every push is costing her.” He doesn’t say the rest. He doesn’t have to. Eight years running this place, I know the shape of a foaling that’s stopped being a birth and turned into a race.

Salinas is still twenty minutes out and she’s getting worse, and I don’t decide.

I take out my phone and I text Finn.

I’ve got no right to it. I cut him eleven days ago, clean and cruel, called him a good worker to his face and drove him off my land to save a life I’ve since decided I don’t want. Every rule I own says put the phone down and handle it alone.

And I think about the way he stood at this mare’s rail every night for months. The way she chose him, the restless one, out of every soul on this ranch. She’s his horse as much as she’s ever been anybody’s, and she’s dying, and he’s an hour south. If it were me, I would want to know.

So I break the one rule I’ve got left. I text him first, knowing it drops into a bin in some locker room an hour south and won’t be in his hand until the horn. The reaching is the thing, not the being answered. Then I do the part that’s more me than the first: I find the way around the wall. Sierra’s at the game, the way she’s always at the game, and her Mack can put a message in a man’s hand when a bin can’t. Get to Finn, I tell her. It’s Bonita, it’s bad, and he’d want to know.

Salinas makes the drive fast and by the time he’s here she’s down. Not because the birth’s moving. Because her legs quit, and that’s worse, that’s so much worse. He gets his arm in her to the shoulder trying to bring the hind legs into line, and Vicente drops in beside him to work it with him, and me, I go to her head.

That’s the one call I make without being told, and I make it out loud, because saying the cold necessary thing is the job that’s always been mine.

I know how to say the necessary thing. Tonight knowing doesn’t make it easier.

I’ve said the cold necessary thing my whole life. I’m the woman who says it. So I say this one too, kneeling in the straw with her big head coming heavy into my lap, and I mean every word of it, and it’s the worst sentence I have ever said out loud, and I say it clean and I do not take it back.

Salinas doesn’t argue. He heard me choose, and choosing is a mercy I handed him, so he takes it and puts everything he has into the one he can save.

It’s most of an hour into it before my phone buzzes against my hip, and I steal the half-second to look because I can’t help it. It’s him. His own words this time, four of them, thumbed out in some intermission where Sierra’s message finally reached him. Coming when it’s over.

He’s coming.

He won’t make it. I know the road and I know the clock and I know he won’t make it for her, and I hold the two words anyway, he’s coming, and I put the phone away and put both hands back on a dying horse.

It goes fast at the end. That’s the only mercy on offer. Salinas gets the legs and pulls with everything he has, and Vicente pulls with him, and the foal comes out of her in a rush of blood and water and long tangled limbs, dark and slick and impossibly still for one second that stops my heart. Then Salinas clears its nose, and it kicks, all at once, a whole life arriving in a single jerk of motion. A filly. Breathing.

And Bonita doesn’t get up.

Bonita’s head comes heavy into my lap. Her hide is slick beneath my hands, the heat already changing. I press my cheek to the white blaze I have known for years, and tears fall into her mane before I can decide what to do with them.

She has spent her whole life searching the fence, pacing a line, watching for the next fight. Even carrying this filly didn’t teach her how to rest.

Tonight she used the last of that restlessness for the one fight that mattered. She held on long enough to get her daughter breathing.

For the first time since she came to me, Bonita isn’t looking for a gap.

“Good girl,” I tell her, my voice breaking against her ear. “You got her here.”

Her next breath is shallow. The one after it barely moves her ribs.