The house was quiet. The tension that had filled the air that morning was gone. Leah welcomed the calm. She felt a little better since she’d had her meltdown. The pressure inside her had gone. Now she mostly felt empty and tired.

Maybe she would do what she had told Maria—just go to bed and sleep, and hope the world looked brighter when she woke up. Although she dreaded having to face her mother again after all the rotten things she’d said that morning, now she just wanted to apologize and beg forgiveness, and pretend it never happened.

She went upstairs and lay down across her bed, too tired to change out of her riding clothes other than to let her clogs fall off her feet onto the floor. She still had sugar cubes in the pocket of her breeches, and her steel hoof pick hung from a snap attached to a belt loop.

The Gracidas’s farrier had given it to her to clean the horses’ feet. He had forged it himself, and he gave one to every groom who worked with the horses he shod. Lauren unsnapped it from her belt loop and looked at it just to occupy her attention for a few moments.

The slender steel had been formed into a unique curve that mimicked the number 5. The top bar of the 5 had the sharp end designed to dig the debris from the crevices of the horse’s foot. The curve of the 5 shape fit perfectly in the hand to give just the right leverage. All the grooms at the Gracidas’s wore their picks clipped to a belt loop, at the ready. No horse came out of a stall in their stables with dirty feet.

Leah clipped hers back onto the snap.

She wanted to sleep. She wanted to sleep but not dream. She wanted her mom to come home. She wanted not to be alone.

If Leslie hadn’t been taken, she wouldn’t have been alone, she told herself. Even when they hadn’t been together, they had still been sisters. She had known that no matter what happened during the day, at the end of the day Leslie would be there for her, and they would talk, and everything would be all right.

“I’m sorry I said I wished you were dead,” she murmured now as she stared at the photograph she kept on her nightstand—of the two of them sitting together on one of Daddy’s horses with Daddy, so handsome, standing holding the bridle. Leslie had been nine at the time, Leah five and missing two front teeth. Leslie sat behind Leah with her arms wrapped around her. She remembered how safe it made her feel to have her sister’s arms around her. How sad it made her feel now to think that she would probably never have that again.