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When Sofia’s voice comes back, it isn’t level anymore.

“I heard you,” she says. “Go to the hospital. Do everything they say. Stay alive long enough for me to answer you in person.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“That wasn’t flirting. That was an order.”

“I know the difference.”

The channel clicks off.

* * *

They put me on a stretcher, strap my arm, keep my leg straight, and start a line when my pressure drops on the second reading. Through the open ambulance doors, Vale and both technicians sit in separate cars, and the scene team lays out numbered cards on the gravel.

Sofia crosses to the transfer table with the case and seals it with a state tech, and signs, and hands it off.

She doesn’t come to the ambulance.

She looks at me once across all that distance, under the white lights. Just once. She confirms the medics are working. She presses her hand flat against her own chest for one second, over her heart.

Then she turns around and goes back to the animals that only she and Dr. Cho can finish treating.

I lie on the stretcher looking up at the ambulance ceiling while the medic tapes the line into my arm. My shoulder is a white roar. The thigh throbs under it like a second heartbeat.

I think about her hand flat on her chest.

Thirteen days ago, I took her phone and her keys and turned a lock on her. Two hours ago, she told me to stay in a chair, and I stayed. Ten minutes ago, I told her I loved her in front of half the law enforcement in the county, and she told me to go to the hospital.

And then she put her hand over her heart, where I could see it, and went back to work.

I don’t know if that’s a yes. I don’t know if she even knows. But I know she didn’t have to let me see it, and she did.

That’s enough to hold on to for the ride.

The doors close. The last thing I hear before the siren is the note-taker on the shared channel, reading the final count.

Nineteen cattle. All alive. All accounted for.

Chapter 25

Sofia

Itreat three more cows after the ambulance leaves, and I don’t remember doing any of it.

That isn’t true. I remember all of it. I remember the numbers, the doses, the times. My hands did everything right. I’ve read my own notes since, and they’re clean.

What I don’t remember is being inside my body while I did it.

I remember his voice on the radio. I love you. I wanted it on the record.

I remember the whole pasture going quiet. The state tech beside me stopped with her pen in the air. Dr. Cho looked across the treatment table at me over the back of a trembling cow, and her face did something I’ll think about for the rest of my life. And I said something, I don’t fully know what, and then I put my hand back on a catheter and kept working, because the cow in front of me was dying and he was not, the medics said he was not, and I had made a promise to the animals before I ever made one to him.

It was the right call. I’d make it again.

It still feels like I tore something.

By six in the morning, all five cows that drank after the breach are standing. The first one tries to eat my clipboard. I let her take a corner of it.