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I take him through what is mine to take him through, and when I reach the edge of my scope I tell him exactly where the edge is and who is standing on the other side of it.

“So you tell Maren.”

“I tell Maren you were here and that nothing has changed that needs her. That is all she gets from me.”

“And the rest?”

“Stays here unless you move it.”

He nods. He has never needed that part explained to him.

He has not missed a game. His neurologist keeps the same count I do.

At the frame he stops with one hand on it.

“Elsa’s home. Catt said she was ready.”

Elsa is their foal. Until this week she lived at the ranch with the other horses.

“Then she was.”

He grins at that. “You’re busy up here.”

“Some days.”

“Riley’s been sending them.”

My pen stops.

“Has he.”

“Tells the young ones if anything ever goes weird, go early.” Finn shrugs. “Says he didn’t, and it cost him a year.”

I look at the page in front of me until I am certain of my own voice.

“That is good advice.”

“He said you’d say that.”

When he is gone I sit in the painted-shut room with my hands flat on the desk for longer than the appointment took.

My husband is not permitted to call Silas about this. He has not tried. Instead he has been standing in dressing rooms for months telling twenty-year-olds to come up the stairs.

I do not tell him what I think of that. Not tonight. Possibly not for a while.

Some of it is mine.

The notice came in August, a little more than two weeks after the work authorization.

Permission to work arrived first. Permission to stay did not. For those two weeks I had a room, a protocol, a badge that opens a door on the second floor, and no guarantee at all that I would be in the country to use any of it.

I used it anyway. I am told that is not what most people do.

When the second envelope came I read it twice standing up and once sitting down, and then I called nobody, because the first person I wanted to tell was downstairs and I wanted a few minutes of knowing it by myself first.

Then I went down and told my husband, and he put his forehead against mine and said nothing at all, which is the most improved thing about him.

Tova flew to Stockholm with my mother the week after the wedding, stayed twelve days, and came back with a sunburn, four opinions about the airline, and a cousin she had previously described as unbearable now installed permanently in her telephone.