Wednesday, 5:40 a.m.
I woke in the chair by the window with the monitor receiver in my lap and a crick in my neck like a nail driven in under the ear.
The room was gray going gold. The sun had been up half an hour. For a second I didn't know why I was in the chair and not the bed, and then the pillowcase in a heap by the door told me, and the number on my arm, gone soft and blurred at the edges where I'd sweated into it.
He was on his side where I'd propped him, one hand under his cheek. His color was his own. His breath went in and caught and came out, and I sat and watched it do that a dozen times before I let myself stand up.
Down in the barn Pilot had passed a heap of oily manure in the night and was pulling at her hay net as if nothing had ever been wrong with her in her life. I listened to her left side anyway. It was loud as a laundromat. I wrote 5:52 BM, oil through, eating on the whiteboard and stood looking at the line above it, 12:25 gut sounds returning, in handwriting I hardly recognized.
When I came back across the yard, he was in the kitchen.
* He stood at the counter in his shorts and the gray T-shirt with the cupboard door open, looking into it the way you'd look into a stranger's fridge.
"Morning," he said. "Where'd we put the filters?"
They were where they've been since we moved in. Second shelf, left, behind the oatmeal. Eleven years of mornings, and he'd made the coffee on most of them.
"Behind the oats."
"Huh." He found them. He stood holding the packet. "I knew that."
He moved slowly, and twice he put the scoop down and had to look for it. His eyes were puffy. There was a crease across his cheek from the spare pillow. He poured the water in and missed a little and wiped it with his palm and looked at the palm.
"Did I throw up last night?"
"You did."
"God." He rubbed his face. "There's no case on my pillow. I thought maybe I'd dreamed it." He turned around and leaned on the counter and looked at me properly, and I stood there in the doorway with my barn jacket on, my boots left at the door and my socks torn and a phone number on my arm, and I waited for him to see all of it.
"You look like hell, Han."
"The mare."
"She all right?"
"She turned around about half past twelve. She's eating."
"Good." He watched the coffee start to drip. "I don't remember going to bed. I remember the sink. I remember taking the shoulder pills. Then nothing, like somebody cut a piece out." He frowned at the pot. "Feel like I got drunk. And I don't drink."
"I know you don't."
"It makes me stupid," he said, which is what he's said every time anybody's ever offered him one, at every wedding and every client's barbecue for eleven years, and it came out the same, flat and friendly, a door shut politely in your face.
I nearly asked him then. Who's Wren? It was in my mouth. I could feel the shape of it. Instead I asked him if he wanted toast, and he said he'd get it, and he went to the bread box and stopped with his hand on the lid like he'd forgotten what the bread box was for.
He gave up on the bread and rolled his right shoulder, wincing, and reached along the counter for the pill bottle by the dish rack.
"Don't," I said.
It came out too fast. He stopped with his hand on it.
"Take ibuprofen. Those put you on your back last night. You were out like a steer on a squeeze chute."
"They're the same ones I always take."
"Humor me."
He looked at the bottle, then at me, and set it down where it had been, label to the wall, and got the ibuprofen out of the cupboard over the stove and shook out three and ate them dry. The blue pills sat in their brown bottle beside the dish rack, with their faces filed off, and I said nothing about them.
Then he looked down at my feet.
"What happened to you?"
The gravel had opened the ball of my right foot and the sock was stuck to it. I hadn't noticed until he said it.
"I ran out to the mare without my boots."
That was true. Everything I said to him that morning was true, and I have never lied to anyone as hard as I lied to him in that kitchen.
He came over and took my face in his hands, which were warm from the coffeepot, and put his mouth on the top of my head and left it there. He smelled of sleep and sour sheets and, under that, of hoof and leather, which is what he smells of even after a shower. The scar on his lip was pressed against my hair. His thumbs moved once along my jaw.
"Sit down," he said into my hair. "You've been up all night with that horse. Eat something." And he reached past me and tapped the Post-it on the toaster with one finger, twice, the way he does, as if the note had said it and not him.
* At 7:02 my phone buzzed on the table beside my plate.
He was at the sink with his back to me, rinsing his mug, humming something with no tune in it. I turned the phone over.
The number.
RULES. 1. Say nothing to him. 2. He stays on the farm today. 3. $391,200 in cash, noon Thursday. Where, later. 4. If you tell anyone, I will know.
I read it twice and put the phone face down, and my toast sat on the plate with one bite out of it.
Noon Thursday. Twenty-nine hours, less a couple of minutes.
The sheriff's office in Marten Falls is nine miles down the road, in the basement of the courthouse, with a dispatcher I've pulled a calf for. I could be there in twelve minutes. If you tell anyone, I will know. I looked at the kitchen window, at the yard and the barn and the empty road beyond the pasture, and I could not think how anyone could know anything that happened in this house. Then I thought about my husband's phone lighting up on the nightstand at one minute to midnight, and I stopped trying.
"Brenners at eight," he said to the window. "Then back there at eleven for their two-year-olds. I'll be back by three, probably."
He dried his hands and started for the hook by the door where his keys hang, and turned and went upstairs to dress instead, and I sat and listened to the fourth stair and the ninth, and the floor over my head creak as he went to the dresser, and I thought about rule two as if it were a bandage I had to get on a horse that didn't want it.
When he came down, dressed, in his work boots with the laces done, I was standing at the foot of the stairs.
"I need you here this morning."
He stopped on the last step. "Yeah?"
"The mare. I want to tube her again at nine and I can't hold her and do it both. She's big and she's sore and I don't trust her."
"Get Osric."
"Osric's got a lameness workup till noon." That was true too.
He looked at me for a long moment. It was the look he gives a hoof before he picks it up: patient, reading. I have never been able to lie to that look. I didn't lie to it. I just stood there and let it read the wrong thing.
"Sure," he said. "Let me call Dale."
He called from the kitchen, leaning on the counter with the phone to his ear, and I stood in the hall and listened.
"Dale. Cal. Yeah, morning. Listen, I've got to push you, something's come up here, Hanne needs a hand with a horse. No, no, nothing like that. Everything's fine. Everything's fine here. Can I do you tomorrow first thing, the colts and all? Yep. Yep. Thanks, bud."
It was his other voice. Easy, sunny, a little louder than his own. It's the voice he uses to tell a woman her pony will be sound in a week when he isn't sure, and to tell his sister's envelopes they can go in the drawer. He said everything's fine here twice, in that voice.
He hung up and came out to the hall and said, "Nine, then," and went back up to lie down for a while, because his head was killing him, and he didn't look at the hook by the door on his way.
I took the key ring off it. His truck key, the house, the shop padlock, the brass tag from the farrier school he's carried for twenty years, all of it warm from hanging by the stove. I put it in my jacket pocket and walked out to the barn.
* In the feed room I lifted the lid of the beet pulp bin and pushed the keys down into it, down past my wrist, till they were a hard lump under a foot of dry shreds. The pulp smelled of molasses and my hand came out sticky to the wrist. I put the lid back on. I stood with both hands flat on it. My palm stayed tacky with molasses the whole length of the yard, and I kept it away from my jeans.
He would look. He would look on the hook, and on the counter, and in yesterday's jeans, and then he'd look at me.
Crossing back toward the house I passed my truck, and the lid of the drug box on the side was shut but the hasp hung open, the padlock dangling from it on its loop.
I stopped. I must have left it. I leave it more often than I should at home, when I'm in and out all night; Osric has a speech about it. I'd been in and out of that box twice last night for the mare. I clicked the lock shut and rattled it and went on.
There was a spare. There is always a spare, with him. He keeps it in the glovebox of his truck, because he locked himself out once at a dairy in Barron County in January and had to wait two hours for his own wife to drive it up.
His truck was parked by the shoeing rig where it always is, nose to the shop. A dark-green Silverado, a 2009, with a crack across the bottom of the windshield from a gravel truck on Highway 8 and a coat of dust you could write your name in. I opened the driver's door and the heat came out at me, and the smell, hoof and coffee and horse sweat and the cherry air freshener he claims he doesn't notice. The seat was cracked along the bolster. In the door pocket stood his hoof knife, the wooden handle gone dark and smooth as a stone where his hand goes. The window handles are the old crank kind, because he says power windows are one more thing to fix, and I wound the driver's down a few turns to let the heat out, the crank squeaking the same note it's squeaked for years and catching, as it always has, a quarter turn short of the top.
I leaned across the seat and opened the glovebox.
Registration. A tire gauge. Napkins from a gas station. Half a roll of vet wrap I'd been looking for since April. The spare key, on a loop of orange baling twine.
I took it. I closed my fist on it.
And under where it had been lay a phone I had never seen. A cheap black flip phone, the kind you buy off a rack at a gas station, scuffed at the corners.
I sat down in the driver's seat with my feet still out on the gravel.
It opened with a click. No lock. The screen lit, a little gray-blue square. There was one contact in it, and the contact had no name, only a number, and I held my left arm up beside it in the truck's hot light. The ink on my skin had smeared and faded, but it was there, all ten digits, and they matched.
There were three messages, all from that number, all from last week. I opened them in order with my thumb.
Tuesday?
Noon.
The third had come on Friday, at 9:14 at night, while I was asleep beside him, or while I was out at somebody's barn, or while he was sitting in this seat in our own yard.
She doesn't know.