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I dreamed of the creek running full. Snowmelt in March, the water over the flat stone, the footbridge six inches above the surface, the sound of it a chord again, not a question. I stood on the bridge and listened to it and the sound was the sound the ranch had been missing, and I was the one standing on the bridge hearing it come back.

I dreamed of staying.

Not as a plan. Not as a decision. As a thing that was already true, in the way dreams made things true — without negotiation, without a contract, without the four-a.m. calculation of whether the numbers supported it. I was here. I was organizing events. The clipboard was mine and the bed was mine and the man was mine and the creek was running full and I was staying.

I slept through the whole night, and the dream held, and when the light came gray at the window I was still in it.

***

I woke to an empty bed.

Not empty in the way that alarmed me. Empty in the way that told me he’d been up for a while — the wool blanket pulled up to my shoulder, the pillow still holding the shape of two heads, the door to the main room open, the stove banked low beyond it. His boots were gone from beside the door. The room smelled of cedar and cold coffee and the fading warmth of a man who’d been there and wasn’t.

I dressed in yesterday’s clothes. The flannel smelled like him. I buttoned it to the collar and put my boots on and picked up my clipboard from the shelf, where he’d left it beside the door with my pen on top.

The arena was gray-gold in the dawn light, the dew still on the panels, the string line beaded with moisture. I was checking the south catch pen alignment when I heard it — a clang, the sound of a horse hitting steel with the flat of a shoulder. Then a second clang, lower, the panel absorbing the impact and transferring it to the post. Then Nickel’s voice, which was not a voice but a sound — a high, indignant snort that carried across the arena and into the cottonwoods.

I came around the north end of the fence and the sound stopped being a sound and became a horse.

Nickel stood in the panel alley with his head low and turned toward his left shoulder, his ears flat against his skull. The panel he’d hit sat two inches off the string line. On the top rail there was a smear — dark hair, and something wet, and a patch of steel wiped clean where the shoulder had dragged across it.

Then I saw the cut.

A flap of skin at the point of the shoulder, three inches, the edges laid open and the hair around it going dark as it filled. Not fast. Steadily. The way a thing filled when it had been opened and hadn’t finished deciding how much it was going to bleed.

Something happened in my chest.

Not a thought. My chest simply closed, the way a hand closed, and my breath went shallow and high and stayed there. I was aware of my heartbeat in my throat. I was aware of the panel, the clip, the exact eight-foot post spacing I had specified in an application I had signed. I was aware that I had checked this alley yesterday and written alignment within tolerance in my own hand.

“Oh,” I said. “Oh, no. Nickel.”

My voice came out wrong. Too high. He swung his head toward it and his ears came forward and he looked at me with the mild, insulted expression of an animal who had lost an argument with a fence and wanted it acknowledged.

I had my phone out before I’d decided to. Four photographs. The panel. The clip. The smear on the rail. The alley from the gate end, showing the line of approach.

Footsteps on the path from the main yard. Walking. Not running.

Josie came around the arena corner with the vet kit over her shoulder and her braid half done, and she looked at the shoulder for about two seconds.

“He’s fine,” she said.

“He’s bleeding.”

“He’s twelve hundred pounds and he’s bleeding a teaspoon.” She set the kit on the rail and opened it. “Morning, you clumsy article.”

Nickel whuffled at her.

She clipped the hair back. Cleaned it. Injected along the edge and waited, counting under her breath, and then she put in four stitches with the unhurried economy of a woman who had done it four hundred times, and Nickel stood for it with one hind foot cocked, entirely unbothered.

“Ten days,” she said. “Keep him out of this alley till the swelling drops. He’ll be sound inside a week.”

That was it. That was the whole of it.

Cash arrived at the gate with hay dust on his shirt. He looked at the shoulder, looked at Josie’s stitches, and said, “Panel catch him?”

“Caught himself on the panel,” Josie said.

He tested the clip, found it loose, tightened it with the pliers off his belt, and realigned the panel to the string line. It took him ninety seconds. Then he put the pliers back and went to the horse barn.