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owner asked me, making sure I had him under control before she left the safety of the truck.
    I grappled with his lead line, trying to keep him from rearing. “I don’t know,” I yelled over my shoulder. “I’ll try.”
    â€œMy daughter is afraid of him,” she yelled back.
    Smart girl.
    The horse’s name was Delaney, eight years old. He had somehow learned that he could get out of work by throwing his front endup in the air and then running away as soon as he touched back down. The woman had purchased him for a lot of money, only to find that he had this odd little quirk of being totally unridable.
    â€œRearers and kids don’t mix,” I had told her over the phone. “It’s an accident waiting to happen.” As far as I was concerned, rearers are like cars with blown transmissions, and you were morally obligated to let the owner know. She agreed to put him up for sale to a professional rider, after I retrained him, and now he was rearing himself toward my barn in gravity-defying leaps.
    I led him to his stall and then looked over his health records. His back had been checked for soreness, his legs and feet were fine, eyes and teeth in good working order. Apparently, the only thing wrong with him was his crappy attitude. The woman shook my hand.
    â€œGood luck with him,” she said. “You have a terrific reputation.”
    I nodded and looked back at the horse. He was busy spooking at his stall door.
    â€œI have someone interested in buying him,” she said. “So—try not to hurt him.”
    â€œI don’t do that,” I answered. She looked relieved and jumped back into her truck. I opened the gate again to let her out.
    â€œYour berries are contagious,” she called out, waving good-bye to me.
    I waved back.
    The problem is, I’m not courageous at all.

Chapter Seven
    W HO INVENTED night anyway? It’s just day, slowly losing consciousness. Night closes in like death, your vision fails, things go bump, you escape into sleep, and if you can’t sleep, you are trapped in nothingness.
    At eleven that night, I had a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich and went into my bedroom, where I had a DVD playing Mozart. Not the Elvira Madigan one, I wouldn’t have been able to bear that, just a few controlled little piano pieces that didn’t need attending to. Actually, I stood in the doorway of my bedroom and just stared in. The sight of my empty bed felt like a reproach, like it was telling me that Matt was with her right now. That he was taking her hand and moving it across his body, and holding it there. And just the thought of it—
    I finally sat down on the edge of the bed to think. He had been screwing her for almost two years. When had it started? When he closed his equine practice and began specializing in small animals? It seemed to me that there was a connection.
    He had made the decision to switch to small animals without even discussing it with me. Not unusual for him. Sometimes he was distant and busy, like he was phoning in his half of the marriage. And that’s not counting the times when he was distant and not so busy. But it was always okay with me. I had my own long-distance phone plan going on, as well. When I questioned him about dropping his equine clients, he shrugged it off.
    â€œMoney,” he said. “I’m putting together a really good business strategy to take advantage of the fact that small-animal vets make more than equine vets.”
    I knew that part of it was true. Equine vets work long hours—driving in the middle of the night to get to an emergency, then driving to the next barn, miles away. Standing in bitter-cold half-lit barns in the middle of winter, trying to treat large hard-to-manage animals. Vets stand in mud puddles. They stand in hot, dusty paddocks in the blazing heat of summer. The time they spend driving from barn to barn is unproductive and they don’t get paid for it.