Page 39 of Forbidden Protector

He does not say what he expected to find. He does not need to.

"Heifer on the south pen's been laboring since four." He leans on the fender. "First calf. Breach." He looks past me to the open door, to the bed behind it and to Mackenzie standing by the stove with her coat on and her hair still a wreck. His expression does not change. "But take your time."

"Knox."

"Didn't say a word." He pushes off the fender. "Also, county already tagged your truck. Aldridge is writing it as weather." A beat. "Same as everything else in this valley."

The pattern. The template Jacob's death wrote for the town, and now every violence that touches us gets stamped with it.

We ride back in his truck.

She takes the back seat without discussion, puts her shoulder against the far door, and opens her phone like a wall between the front seat and whatever just happened.

Knox catches my eye in the mirror once. I give him nothing. He pockets it same as he pockets everything, which means Sage will have the full picture by dinner, and I will deal with that when it arrives.

On my front porch, placed with ceremony on the second step, a dead vole. Grey, intact, belly up. The barn tabby sits four feet away with its yellow eyes on me, waiting for the review.

"There's a body on your porch," Mackenzie says behind me.

"There's usually two."

She studies the cat, then the vole. Her mouth twitches once and she puts it away before I can use it.

"Does it have a name?"

"The vole?"

"The cat."

"No."

"You've lived here two years and you haven't named your cat?"

"It's not my cat. It's a barn cat that brings me dead things."

"Sounds like a relationship."

I step over the vole and head for the calving barn, because every answer I can think of puts us in territory her buttons are working overtime to close.

The heifer is down.

Two hands are in the pen with her. Roy, who has been on this ranch longer than I have been alive, and a kid named Danny who came on in November and still looks startled by most of what happens here. Roy has the heifer's head and Danny is at the hindquarters with a headlamp that keeps slipping off his forehead, and neither of them is smiling.

"Breach," Roy says, same as Knox did. One word carrying the whole situation. "Both legs back. I can get one but not both."

"I've got it." I strip my coat, roll my sleeves, and wash to the shoulder in the bucket by the gate. The cold water lights up the stitches all over again.

Danny steps back, hands me the headlamp, and looks as relieved as only a twenty-year-old can about someone else putting their arm inside a cow.

"Hold this." I hand the lamp to Mackenzie without looking. Looking at her while I am about to do this is a bandwidth I don't have.

She takes it. Angles the beam on the hindquarters without being told, clean light, no shadow, no wobble. Better than Danny had it in thirty seconds.

She has been around livestock. She has not said so, but how she holds that lamp says it louder than saying it would.

Roy watches the handoff and says nothing, which from Roy is the same as a standing ovation.

Both front legs are back. I find the first hoof and bring it forward, and the calf shifts in the canal, and the heifer bellows once and goes quiet, deciding to trust whoever is handling this.