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Vale Herd and Reproduction Services.

My whole body goes cold.

Chapter 4

Cole

Iwatch her go still at the window, and I know the man in the white truck before he opens his door.

Warren Vale steps down in pressed khakis and polished boots, with thick silver hair and careful hands and the warm, easy face of a man who has never once confused kindness with respect. He’s fifty-something. He carries himself like the ground was built to his specifications.

Eleven months, she said through the door at two in the morning. He spent the next year telling everyone she was unstable.

I didn’t know I could want to hurt somebody I’d never met this badly.

“Stay inside,” I tell her.

“No.”

She walks out past me into the treatment shed with her bag. I let her, because the cow is out there, and because I want Vale to see her standing on her own two feet, and because I’m not stupid enough to think I get to decide that she hides from him.

“Sofia,” he says, like he’s relieved. “Thank God. Russell told me there’d been an incident.”

“When did Russell call you?” I ask.

His pause is small. “Early this morning. Ranch management asked me to take veterinary control of the shipment.”

“Show me the written request,” Sofia says.

His eyes move over her borrowed clothes and come back to her face. “You look exhausted.”

“That document will be easier to find if you stop examining me.”

He doesn’t find it. He talks instead. Shipping fever. Respiratory distress. Nasal discharge. A manageable event the state will turn into a quarantine if someone doesn’t take charge. He hasn’t crossed the outer panel. From where he stands, he can’t see the cow’s nose or count her breaths.

“Which animal had nasal discharge?” Sofia asks.

“Several, according to the report.”

“Ear tag number.”

“I don’t have the list in front of me.”

“Fourteen C has no discharge, no cough, and no fever. She crashed after drinking from one tank, and she improved on treatment for nitrate poisoning.”

His smile turns patient. I watch what it does to her. Her shoulders don’t move, but something behind her face closes up tight, like a gate swinging shut against weather.

“You were always thorough,” he says. “Under pressure, thoroughness becomes fixation.”

“You’ve always enjoyed diagnosing women outside your species,” I say.

His eyes come to me. I let him look. I let him see exactly what I’d like to do and exactly how little I intend to do it, and after a second, he looks away first.

He opens the back of his truck. A clean stainless cooler. “Transfer the samples. My courier can have them at the lab by noon.”

“No,” Sofia says.

“Sofia.”