Harry was apparently responsible for the evening feeds now. I bit down on the urge to nitpick at him and dragged Emma inside. “Okay. You have my attention. What’s the theory?”
Emma stuck her hands in her pockets. “Same as the one Harry uses on me. That nothing can change if we don’t try. We want him to be more socialised, but that’s not going to happen if we keep him away from all the others. I think he’s lonely, and he acts like a prick to compensate.”
Her scowl was so intense that it was hard to tell if she was having a dig at herself or me, but the theory fit us both, particularly if you combined the worst traits of our personalities. Had Shadow absorbed that from both of us? He’d always been a difficult horse, but had we made him worse? “What did Jonah think when he was here?”
“Why do you care what Dad thinks?”
“Why did you bring him here if you don’t?”
“Because you were so messed up I was scared you wouldn’t come back. When I called him, they were still saying your liver might be pulverised.”
I winced. “Thanks for the visual.”
“You’re welcome. But seriously, I was scared, and I needed help, and that night was probably the only time he’ll ever be able to help me. It might not mean much to you, but it meant everything to me.”
I hadn’t thought of it that way, and suddenly my father’s opinion of my renegade horse ceased to matter. I pulled my sister close and hugged her tight. “You should work with Shadow more. Perhaps you understand each other.”
Emma sighed. “Perhaps we do.”
She went back outside, and after swallowing a couple of codeine, I followed her. The idea of Shadow being an anxious horse troubled me. I parked myself on an upturned crate by the tack room and watched him for the rest of the evening, all the while jonesing for the cigarettes I’d forgotten about until now.
Harry came to join me as the sun went down. “Something on your mind?”
I jerked my head in Shadow’s general direction. “Emma’s right about him. He’s so chilled out shacked up with the ladies.”
“Yeah... it’s interesting, isn’t it? How aggression can mask other things. You’ve said before that he’s calmer when he’s exercised—which works for humans too—but I’d never considered the social aspect of it. Stupid, really, because lots of my patients see a spike in their recovery when they come to my group sessions.”
I couldn’t imagine anything worse than trying to put myself back together with an audience, but that was me, and I’d already established that I was probably part of the problem. “Do you think Emma could ride him?”
“You’re asking me?” Harry leaned against the tack room door, lazily playing with the mane of the pony who came to investigate. “I don’t know anything about riding, and I’ve never seen Emma on a horse.”
“But you know her,” I said. “Or at least, you understand how her mind works better than I do. She quit riding because she became terrified of hurting herself. Seriously, it was like this phobia that appeared overnight after Grandpa died. I never connected the two, but that was around the time Shadow started acting out too.”
“Was it sudden? Your grandfather’s death, I mean?”
“Yes and no.” I watched Shadow poke his head out of his stall and call out to his new girlfriend next door. “He was old and getting frailer, but I thought we had more time. We all did.”
“Waiting for the end is almost as bad as the event itself.”
“Is that what happened to your dad?”
“My dad died of a heart attack in a taxi on his way home from a strip club. It was so fast, he probably didn’t realise what was happening, and I hate myself for thinking that he didn’t deserve to go out so easy.”
I looked up at him, squinting in the murky evening light. “Does he deserve you hating yourself instead?”
“Probably not.”
You complex motherfucker.I nudged him with my elbow and went back to my horse-watching. After a while, Harry dropped a subtle kiss to my head and wandered off.
With the farm winding down for the night, it didn’t take me long to follow.
Chapter Fifteen
Harry
Joe recovered, slowly, and the farm went back to my perception of normal, but nothing felt quite the same. For starters, I was sharing a bed with him every night, but it was more than that. Despite him returning to most of his duties sooner than anyone thought possible, an ominous cloud settled over my soul, and I couldn’t shake it.
One late afternoon, I found Emma at Shadow’s gate, feeding him Polo mints. “Don’t tell Joe. He doesn’t like them having sugar.”