Chapter 1: Quarter Crack

CARYS

The colt’s foot was in my lap and the crack ran all the way up to the hairline.

I had maybe two minutes before he snatched it back. Grey colt, three years old, muscled like a boxer and twice as opinionated. He had already struck the aisle wall once and chipped a board. Behind me the February wind came through the shedrow and found the sweat under my collar.

“How bad,” the vet said.

“Bad enough that I’m not going to lie to you.”

Dr. Nita Boyle crouched down beside me with her hands in her coat pockets. She was fifty and built like a fence post and she had pulled me out of bed at ten past five with one sentence. Emergency at Blackberry Run, bring your rig.

I ran my thumb along the split. It opened under the pressure, a thin dark mouth in the hoof wall, and I felt it go all the way to blood supply. Not just a cosmetic crack. A moving one.

“He’s bearing on it,” I said. “Every stride he takes, that quarter flexes and the crack works. You can patch him today and he’ll pop it again in a week if nobody fixes why.”

“And why is it?”

“His heel’s run under on that side. He’s landing crooked and the wall’s taking it instead of the frog.”

The colt leaned his whole weight into my shoulder. Eleven hundred pounds of opinion. My thigh was already on fire and my left forearm had gone to a dull throb that would be a cramp in another minute.

“Memo,” I said through my teeth. “I need his head up.”

The groom clucked and shortened his grip. He was maybe twenty-two, thin, in a hoodie with a hole in the elbow. “Saint,” he said to the colt, “be a saint.”

“Is that his name?”

“We call him that because he’s a devil,” Memo said. “It’s a joke that got away from us.”

I laughed, which was a mistake, because laughing in a cold barn before six in the morning makes your eyes water, and I did not want wet eyes in this aisle of all the aisles in Kentucky.

I had learned to hold a foot in this shedrow. Third stall from the end, the one with the crooked latch, was where my father used to park his box and let me pass him nails. The boards still smelled like the same thing. Pine and ammonia and liniment and dust. Twenty years gone and it went into me like a splinter.

Nita stood up and her knees cracked. “Can you get him right?”

“I can get him sound for the spring if I get him on a cycle and nobody argues with me about his angles.”

“Oh,” Nita said, “somebody will argue with you about his angles.”

I was reaching into my box for the wire when I heard boots.

Not hurried. That was the thing I noticed before I noticed anything else. Everybody in a racing barn at six a.m. moves like the building is on fire. These boots came down the aisle at the speed of a man who had already decided how the morning would go.

The colt’s ears went forward. Memo straightened up and got quiet. Even Nita turned around.

“Set his foot down,” the man said.

I knew the voice before I lifted my head. I knew it in my spine, in my stomach, in the backs of my knees. Five years, and my body filed it under *home* before my brain got a vote.

I set the foot down. Then I stood up, slow, because my thigh had locked, and I made myself look at him.

Everett Shaw.

He had got older in the way that is not fair. Thirty-five now. Taller in a barn aisle than he had any business being, in a canvas coat gone pale at the shoulders and gloves shoved in the pocket, and his hair was shorter and there was grey coming at the temple. His jaw was the same. His mouth was the same, which was a problem, because I had spent two years of my life learning that mouth and five years telling myself I’d made it up.

His hands were bare in thirty-degree air. Big, scarred across the knuckles, the right thumb bent a little from a horse that had slammed a stall door on it when I was twenty-one.

My heart went so hard I felt it in my throat.

“Hello, Carys,” he said.

“You work here.”

“I run here.”

Nita looked at the ceiling like the ceiling owed her money.

“You didn’t tell me,” I said to her.

“If I’d told you, would you have come?”

“No.”

“Well, then.”

Everett came the rest of the way down the aisle. He stopped close enough that I had to look up. He smelled like coffee and cold air and the inside of a horse blanket, and I hated that I catalogued it, and I catalogued it anyway. The hair on my arms stood up under three layers of flannel.

“Nita called you,” he said. It was not a question.

“At five past five.”

“Good.” He looked past me at the colt’s foot. “How bad.”

“I just told her.”

“Tell me.”

He said it quietly. That was the thing about Everett. He never raised his voice in his life and I had watched grown men with eight-figure bloodstock go pale when he didn’t.

I told him. The crack, the under-run heel, the way the colt was landing. I pointed with a rasp instead of my finger because if I had lifted my finger he would have seen my hand shake.

He listened the entire way through without one interruption. When I finished he crouched down, picked up the colt’s foot himself, and held it out, braced across his own thigh, so that the light fell on the wall.

He did not hand it to me. He held it. That is the trainer’s way of saying *I am not going anywhere, do your work.*

“Show me,” he said.

So I knelt in the aisle shavings next to him, close enough that my shoulder was nearly against his arm, and I showed him. I traced the split with the edge of a hoof knife. His forearm was six inches from my face. The muscle in it stood up under the pushed-up sleeve, holding the foot steady so I could work, and I thought about nothing at all for one whole second except the heat coming off him.

Five years. Five years, and my body had kept the file open.

“Pare it or patch it,” he said.

“Both. I debride the crack, dry it, lace it with wire, fill it with acrylic. Then he goes in a bar shoe with that quarter floated so the wall stops loading every stride.” I sat back on my heels. “And then I come back in ten days, not six weeks, because he’ll grow out of my fix before he grows out of the cause.”

“Ten days.”

“Ten.”

“Who pays for ten,” Everett said.

“The man who wants a stakes horse in May.”

Something moved at the corner of his mouth. Not a smile. The place a smile used to live.

“Memo,” he said. “Hold him on the near side, and when she goes to the fire don’t let him turn around and watch.”

Memo moved. Everybody moved for him.

I lit the forge in the bed of my truck with the door rolled up and my back to the barn. My hands were not steady and the propane took three tries. Out past the end of the shedrow the hills were coming up out of the dark, black fence lines, mud the colour of coffee grounds, the big maple at the turn of the drive that my dad used to park under in August.

The bank letter was folded in my glovebox. I knew every line of it. Eleven thousand four hundred dollars, past due, and a date in May when the forge my father built goes on a list with other people’s tractors.

I had sixty-two clients’ worth of nothing. I had a truck, a used anvil, a propane bill, and a last name that made grooms turn around in Kentucky feed stores.

And I had a quarter crack on a stakes colt in Everett Shaw’s barn.

I heated the bar shoe until it went orange and I beat it into shape on the anvil with the wind trying to take the sparks, and it was the first thing all winter that felt like mine.

When I came back up the aisle with the shoe in my tongs, he was still holding the foot.

Nobody holds a foot for twenty minutes. Nobody. Grooms rotate. Assistants whine. I burned the shoe on to read the fit, and the smoke came up sweet and awful between us, and he did not flinch or turn his face away.

“Still too much heel on the outside,” he said.

“It’s bearing surface.”

“It’s leverage.”

“It’s bearing surface for the next ten days, and if I take any more he’s got no foot left to nail to.”

“Then don’t nail. Glue him.”

“He’s got good horn in front, I’m not gluing a horse I can nail.”

“Carys.”

“Everett.”

Nita made a noise behind us like a kettle. “Oh my God,” she said. “It’s five years later and you two are still doing this.”

My face went hot all the way to my hairline. I bent over the foot so nobody would see it.

He looked at me a second too long. I felt it on the side of my neck like a hand.

I set the shoe. Six nails, each one placed where the wall would hold it, the last three driven with that flat clean sound that means you’re in good horn. I clinched and rasped and set the foot down and the colt stood square for the first time all morning.

Memo whistled.

“Walk him,” Everett said.

Memo walked him out to the end of the shedrow and back. The colt went down the aisle flat and level, heel first, no snatch in his stride.

Everett watched his feet the whole way. Then he wiped his hands on his jeans and said, “What do you charge.”

“Two eighty for the repair. Two twenty for the shoeing.”

“Fine.”

“That’s not negotiable.”

“I said fine.”

I stood there with my rasp in my hand and my pulse in my ears.

“I have twenty head that need doing,” he said. “Four-week cycle. Four mornings a week, five o’clock, and the colt every ten days until he runs or he doesn’t. You’ll be first in the aisle and you’ll work around the sets.”

The number went through my head before I could stop it. Twenty head. A cycle. Eleven thousand four hundred dollars, and a date in May.

“No,” I said.

“No.”

“You know why no.”

“Say it out loud,” Everett said.

Memo took the colt into his stall very fast. Nita found something interesting in her truck.

I put the rasp in my box because I did not trust myself holding anything.

“Five years ago I stood in front of the racing commission,” I said. “I told them what I saw in a stall at Keeneland in the dark on the ninth of April. They took your licence for three years. People I grew up with crossed the road from me, Everett. My own father’s clients wouldn’t take my calls. I lost every barn in this county.”

“I know what it cost you.”

“Don’t you dare.” My voice cracked and I hated it. “Don’t you dare be gentle about it.”

He did not move and he did not look away. That was worse. He had always been able to stand in one place and let you come apart in front of him and not use any of it against you.

“Then I’ll be plain,” he said. “I have a stakes colt with a bad foot and a soundness problem that four farriers have made worse. I don’t care what your name does to a room. You are the best hands in this state and your father taught you every one of them. I’m hiring you for the spring meet.”

“My name on your payroll,” I said, “two months before your re-hearing.”

“Yes.”

“They’ll say you bought me.”

“They’ll say worse than that.”

“And you don’t care.”

“I didn’t say that.” He looked at me then in a way that made my stomach drop through the floor of the aisle. “Monday. Five o’clock.”

He started up the shedrow.

“Everett.”

He stopped.

My hands were filthy and shaking and I asked the thing I had been carrying for five years, in the one place I’d sworn I would never ask it.

“Why didn’t you fight it? Not one hearing. Not one letter. You never said a word against me. Why?”

He stood with his back to me long enough that I heard the colt pull hay.