And Connell didn’t save her. She took the lead out of the gate and held it around the turn, running faster than I’d ever seen her run. When they came past the stands, she was two lengths ahead. “They never come home,” the man next to me said as the horses ran down the backstretch. “The ones who break early never come home.” But Rocky was six lengths ahead on the final turn, and ten lengths ahead past the stands and the finish—an easy win. A woman in front of me hugged her husband, and the man beside me dropped to his seat, disgusted. Usually the helpless feeling dissolves into euphoric relief when they win, but I didn’t feel giddy or even pleased. I felt like there was something I hadn’t been told, or something I hadn’t understood.

Connell caught my eye in the winner’s circle while Rocky stamped and sweated beneath him. I used to love to see him in the winner’s circle and know he was mine, my love, my prize. Now I was stunned, for a minute, that we’d taken him back as a jockey.

“You didn’t hold her in,” I said, shading my eyes to look up.

“I was holding her,” Connell said. “She’s the fastest horse out there.”

The shutter clicked for the win picture, and he swung Rocky in a tight circle back toward the stables on the other side of the track.

*

I waited for Connell by the paddock. I didn’t want to. I’d put in my time waiting by the paddock. He grinned at me when he showed up, in a baseball cap and a racetrack jacket.

“Did she really win because she was the fastest?” I asked him.

“The fastest doesn’t always win,” he said. “But yeah, she’s the fastest.”

“Did you know she’d win when you told me she would?”

He studied me for a minute. “You know what, Addy?” he said. “This is a business. The track has to make money to stay open. The state has to make money just like they do off the lottery. Me and the other jockeys, we have to make money to eat. Those horses are running so the old boys in the stands can waste a Sunday and the rest of us can live our lives. That’s all.”

It was the longest speech I’d ever heard him make, and I still wasn’t sure I had an answer. I said, “I didn’t understand what was happening when we talked earlier—”

“Nothing happened.”

“So I don’t know if I agreed to anything. I don’t want to know if I would have agreed. But they’re my dad’s horses and he wouldn’t, ever, so it can’t happen that way again.”