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He just stands there, between my window and the brush.

I understand, with a sick lurch, that he isn’t guarding the window to keep me in. Or not only that. He’s standing where a bullet would come from.

I pull the pick out of the channel. My hand is bleeding a little. I press it against my shirt.

“I hate you,” I tell him.

“I know,” he says.

He doesn’t move until I step back from the window. Then he walks around to the front, and a minute later there’s a knock on the bedroom door, and my name, and he opens it and sets a clean gauze pad and a tube of antiseptic on the floor just inside the threshold and closes it again.

He locks it. Of course he does.

I sit on the bed and clean my knuckle and cry for about ninety seconds, furious and silent, and then I stop, because I have a patient and a plan and neither one improves with self-pity.

* * *

At six-fourteen, he unlocks the door and stands back. “She’s breathing faster. Still standing.”

I grab my bag and walk past him.

In the radio room there’s a landline, beige and corded and old enough to have survived several generations of men who trusted wires more than witnesses. I saw it yesterday. I point at it.

“I need to call my office. You can stand next to me. You can record it if Barbed Crown enjoys making evidence against itself.”

He looks at the phone. “The line runs through ranch headquarters.”

“So your people can see who I call.”

“And maybe hear it.”

“Thank you for finally labeling a trap before I step in it.”

He lets me dial. It goes to voicemail.

“Becca, it’s Sofia. I’m delayed at the ranch call. Move today’s schedule to the relief list, and tell Mrs. Alvarez her mare still gets priority if the fever comes back. I left the blue pencil in the certificate drawer, so lock the treatment refrigerator and call the field-service vendor from the outside number. Don’t log into my account until I call you in person.”

I hang up. Cole leans against the desk, arms loose.

“Mrs. Alvarez,” he says.

“A client.”

“Blue pencil.”

“I lose a lot of pencils.”

There is no blue pencil in any drawer. Becca and I made up the phrase after someone tried three passwords on my certificate account the month I opened the practice. It means lock everything, call the insurance company, and call the state from a phone that has never touched mine. Mrs. Alvarez doesn’t own a mare. Mrs. Alvarez doesn’t exist.

Cole knows the message is coded. I can see it in the way he doesn’t ask again. He doesn’t know the code.

It’s the first thing I’ve owned since he took my phone.

An engine crosses the cattle guard before either of us can say anything else.

Cole goes to the window. I follow, close enough to see over his shoulder, close enough to feel the heat coming off him.

A white veterinary truck is coming down the service road, clean enough to advertise bad judgment. Dark green lettering across both doors, a gold longhorn underneath.