When I got home in the afternoon, the horse was gone from the kitchen and the house was cold. There was a plastic baby bottle on the kitchen counter. The kitchen doors were both closed, so I went through to the greenhouse, where the sliding-glass door was open and the ferns were freezing. I was sliding the heavy door shut when I saw Cort in the hot tub on the deck, naked to the waist, with the new foal slick and wet on his lap, his arm over her neck to hold her down in the hot water. I stepped outside into the sharper cold.

“Throw me that towel,” Cort said. “I need to keep her ears warm.”

I handed him the towel, making a mental note not to use it myself—it was striped and blue—and he wrapped it around the foal’s head so her forelock tufted out from the terry cloth. She lifted her nose in protest.

“I had to warm her up,” he said. “She keeps shivering. The vet’s in Great Falls.”

I watched them for a while, each breath stabbing my lungs. “It’s below zero every winter,” I finally said.

He glared at me over fogged glasses and said nothing. Frost formed on the invisible hairs around the filly’s velvet nose, bringing each hair into white-sheathed focus. My ears began to sting and I put my hands over them.

“Maybe you shouldn’t raise horses here,” I said, hearing my own voice muffled. “Or maybe we should move.”

He ignored me and adjusted the filly’s turban to keep the towel dry. Water from the tub froze in sheets of white on the planks of the deck. I went inside to warm up. The tarp was still on the floor in the room off the kitchen, and I felt my chest tighten. I counted the hours I had lain awake the night before, went upstairs, took off my shoes and climbed into bed. It was three o’clock. Kids would be getting out of school.

I woke up as the sun was going down, and put on a bathrobe. Cort sat on the floor with the foal, nursing it and keeping it warm. We ate leftover chicken and salad foraged from the fridge. I thought about bringing in the birthday cake from the trunk, but figured it was frozen solid, so I stood in my bathrobe at the woodstove until my legs stung, then went back upstairs. Cort stayed awake all night. I heard him get up a few times and walk around while I lay in bed, unable to sleep. He was still holding the foal, on the tarp on the floor, when I got up in the morning. I drove to work with itching eyes, telling myself it was only lack of sleep that was limiting my peripheral vision. The horse had only been in one room, after all.