The Horsewoman(32)

Mom and Grandmother invited me to dinner. I told them I’d be terrible company.

“You’re going to sit at home and worry yourself sick,” Mom said.

“Sounds like a plan,” I said.

They didn’t leave until a little after eight, later than I preferred to eat. I was up in my room by then, anxiously texting and calling Daniel again and again. I went downstairs, poured myself a glass of white wine, brought it back up to the room. Tried and failed to follow a book and then a Netflix movie. Realized I hadn’t touched my wine. Picked up the glass, put it down hard enough that I spilled some.

Screw it.

I was going to take one last drive over to his house. Picturing myself pulling off Pierson and seeing the house lit up and the Kia parked in his driveway. Picturing myself ripping into him for disappearing this way.

I stuffed my phone into my back pocket, grabbed my car keys, took the stairs two at a time.

When I opened our front door, there he was.





THIRTY-THREE

Daniel



HE HAD BEEN rehearsing on the long ride back to Wellington what he was going to say to Becky, provided she did not slam the door right in his face. But when he saw her right there in front of him, it was as if all the words drained from his head.

It was not the first time with Becky that he had lost his words, though never in the ring. He would never completely understand her, no matter how long they were together. But by now he knew her, sometimes better than she knew herself, as annoyed as she would get when he would say that to her.

He had never told her of so many times when he felt…what was the expression?

Lengua atada.

Tongue-tied.

She spoke first.

“Nice of you to stop by,” Becky said.

But she was smiling.

It was a good sign.

He nodded at the car keys in her left hand.

“Were you about to go out?” he said.

“Where the hell have you been?”

“You have a right to ask that,” he said. “And you have a right to be angry with me.”

“I’m not angry, Daniel, swear to God I’m not,” she said. “If I was, believe me, you’d know it. Maybe the neighbors, too, and the horses down in the barn. But I knew it had to be serious for you to be gone this long.”

“It was important,” he said. “On that you must trust me.”

“Now I’m just relieved that you’re back,” she said. “Just please tell me where you’ve been, okay?”

“No,” he said.





THIRTY-FOUR

Maggie



“AND THAT’S THE way you two left it?” Maggie Atwood said to her daughter the next morning over coffee at the kitchen table. “He just said ‘no’?”

“Yes.”

“And you’re okay with that?”

“For now,” Becky said. “Like I tell you and Grandmother all the time: he’s Daniel.”

Caroline Atwood was already out for her “power walk.” She still got her three miles in most mornings, to Southshore Boulevard and back, but as Maggie saw—and sometimes heard—there wasn’t much grace or power left in her mother’s stride.

“At some point you and Daniel are going to have a lot to talk about,” Maggie said.

“Tell me about it,” Becky said. “But for now, my dear mother, I’m going down the hill and get on our horse and work with our trainer and try to act as if everything’s normal.”

“Nothing has been normal around here for a while,” Maggie said.

“You going to work out this morning?” Becky said to her mother.

Maggie didn’t go to the gym every morning. She’d occasionally give herself a day off. But never more than once a week.

“I am,” she said. “Soon as I change.”

And she was going to work out.

Just not at the gym.

She hadn’t technically told her daughter a lie, even if Becky thought she meant the gym. But she wasn’t telling the truth, either. Maggie was on her way to Gus Bennett’s small horse farm, at the other end of Palm Beach Point.

She was going there to ride.

She hadn’t mentioned it to her mother. She didn’t want Becky to know, either. She’d sworn Gus to secrecy, and exacted the same promise from his small staff, telling them that if people in Wellington were talking about Maggie Atwood riding horses again, he’d find out who couldn’t keep their mouth shut and fire their ass.

Dr. Garry had told her she was still a long way from riding. If that. Maggie’d finally decided that she couldn’t wait that long to get up on a horse again.

Gus Bennett hadn’t even blinked when Maggie floated the idea. But Gus was no ordinary trainer and knew more than Maggie ever would about the damage a riding accident could do. He had once been a world-class rider, on his way to the 2008 Olympics when he had been thrown at a qualifying event in Rome and suffered a “low C-level injury” to his spinal cord that had paralyzed him from the waist down and put him in a wheelchair for life.

But in all the years Maggie had known him, she had never heard Gus complain about his accident, or even discuss it. Ever since, he had acted as if it was the rest of the world that was disabled, not him. There had been worse riding injuries. Another great rider, Kevin Babington, was now paralyzed from the shoulders down, but had continued his own career in the sport as a trainer.