Page 19 of Thunder

She's so good, gentle and quick and sure, thermometer and stethoscope and her hands reading the animal like a language she was born speaking.

We don't talk except about the heifer.

Temp's up.

Lungs are junky on the left side.

Early pneumonia, caught in time, treatable, a shot of Nuflor and Banamine, and watch her closely for forty-eight hours.

It's the longest I've stood next to my sister since the hospital.

We were getting good at being sisters.

That's the part nobody understands about what got taken from me.

It wasn't a lifetime of closeness that broke, it was the brand-new bond we'd only just started building after I came home a Lyle.

The sisterhood I waited twenty-two years for and got to hold for exactly one season before my mother's sins put a wall down the middle of it.

And I can't even be angry at Grace for the wall.

That's the cruelest part.

She lost her mother twice and found out from a text, and I've got the face of the woman who did it.

If I were her I don't know that I'd be able to look at me either.

So I hold the heifer's head and I don't say any of the hundred things on my mind.

I let my sister work in silence, and I take what I can get, which is twenty minutes of standing close to somebody I love who can't love me back right now.

"You caught it early," Grace says, drawing up the shot, and it's the closest thing to a kind word she's given me in weeks. "Another day and we'd be talking about whether we could save her. You did right, calling me."

"Thank you."

I want to say more.

I want to say, Grace, please, I didn't know, I found out the same day you did, I would never— I've wanted to say it a hundred times—but her walls are up, and the heifer's between us, and Raine's right there, and this isn't the moment, there's never a moment.

"Really. Thank you for coming."

She gives the shot. She doesn't look at me.

And behind us, the bike goes quiet.

Thunder doesn't come to the rail.

He stays back by his bike, one boot on the ground, giving the vet room to work and giving me—I don't know what he's giving me.

Distance.

Cover.

A choice.

He stays back where I don't have to deal with him, and somehow that's worse than if he'd walked right up, because it's considerate.

I don't want him to be considerate, I want him to be the cold, dangerous man I can stay angry at.