The Horsewoman(31)

And given my short odds with long-term boyfriends, it would get messed up. Maybe that’s what I ought to tell him if he brought up the kisses we’d shared.

If he didn’t bring it up, well, then screw it and screw him.

Not that I was on edge.

I didn’t need Daniel telling me to relax right now, like I was going into the ring. Needed to do it myself.

You’re going out for a burger, not looking to make things official.

I was about five minutes late arriving at the small ranch house on Pierson. Becky Standard Time. I’d thought about getting my hair done but had decided I didn’t want to look like I was trying too hard, going all girly-girl on him.

Yup, I thought.

Your move, Daniel.

But when I pulled into the driveway, his used Kia, which he liked to say had a million miles on it, wasn’t there.

Maybe for once he was running even later than me. Or he’d loaned his car to one of his carless friends from the other barns.

I checked my phone to see if I had missed a text. Nothing. Got out of the car and went and rang the doorbell.

Waited.

Nothing.

Pulled out my phone and texted him.

where the heck are u?

No response. I called his number and was sent straight to voicemail.

I went back to the car and sat there waiting.

Seven thirty.

Now I was worried, not about him standing me up, but that something might have happened with what he called the federales.

Texted him again.

No response.

Called again.

Voicemail.

I waited until eight o’clock and drove home. The other two Atwood women were out to dinner. I cooked up some pasta, ate it. Texted and called again.

Nothing from Daniel.

Around eleven o’clock I couldn’t take it, got back into the car and drove back over to his house. No car in the driveway. No lights.

The next morning, he didn’t show up at the barn.





THIRTY-TWO



DANIEL USUALLY BEAT the grooms to the barn. I didn’t hear from him on Monday. He didn’t show up for work on Tuesday morning, either.

“We need to call the police,” Mom said. “Something has obviously happened to him.”

“We can’t,” I said.

“What do you mean, we can’t?” Grandmother said.

“Daniel is more afraid of the government than ever,” I said.

I didn’t feel as though I’d betrayed his confidence.

“So what are we supposed to do?” Grandmother said.

“Wait,” I said.

“Not my strong suit,” she said.

“You know it’s not mine,” I said.

Mom watched me in the ring with Coronado both days that Daniel had been gone. She said that as concerned as we were about Daniel, we all had to be practical. Coronado and I were competing in the International Arena on Thursday afternoon. With or without Daniel. As long as Mom and I stayed inside the ring, things still felt normal.

After I fed Coronado a carrot, Emilio took him back inside the barn. Grandmother had left for a doctor’s appointment, saying she wanted her blood pressure checked, “for obvious reasons.”

Where was he?

Why hadn’t he even called?

“Don’t you have that Find My Friends app on your phone?” Mom said.

“He won’t let me use it with his phone,” I said.

“Why not?”

“Because he’s Daniel,” I said.

“Say he is in trouble with the government, even being detained somewhere, wouldn’t he have called us for help?” she said.

“He doesn’t ever ask anybody for help,” I said.

“What can we do, besides wait?”

“Try to find him,” I said.

I’d waited as long as I could. But we were moving up on forty-eight hours since I’d heard from him last. Emilio had already sworn to me that he hadn’t heard from Daniel and didn’t know where he might have gone.

At the horse show I had met Daniel’s trainer and groom friends from the other barns. Most but not all of them were immigrants. So they had their secrets, too. But maybe one of them knew Daniel’s secrets, where he’d gone, when he might be coming back, and if he was safe.

If.

By the midafternoon, Emilio and I’d made a tour of eight barns in our general area. We spoke to trainers and grooms and some riders, giving them my cell phone number but trying not to sound any alarms. Trying not to let them see that I was worried out of my skull.

But nobody we spoke to had seen him. Nobody had heard from him.

Totally off the grid for two days now.

Where was he?

I told Emilio, who was as afraid of the government as Daniel was, that my own worst fear was that he was at some detention center and they hadn’t even allowed him a phone call.

“He will explain when he returns,” Emilio said.

“If he returns,” I said.

I kept calling Daniel’s phone. Kept texting. We took one last swing by Daniel’s house. Nobody home. He knew how much the qualifier on Thursday meant to all of us. Something bad had to have happened.

Please don’t let it be bad.

We were back to that.

By five o’clock we returned to Atwood Farm, exhausted.