He sauntered forward in that slow, loose way of his and rested his arms on the top fence rail. “I just wanted to see how she’s coming along. I pretty much put my ass on the line last night when Slade asked me if working with her was putting you in danger.”

Erin walked over to join him at the barrier. “Thank you for assuring him that I’m safe with her. I truly believe I am.”

He smiled slightly. “Just don’t forget that even a rock-solid horse can accidentally hurt you. Always be on guard.”

It was Erin’s turn to smile. “I won’t forget. Tonight she’s calm and had no problem with me petting her right away, but we’ll be back at square one again in the morning.”

“Has working with her every day taught you anything?” he asked.

Erin knew he was asking if she had drawn similarities between herself and the troubled equine. “I can definitely see parallels between our reactions to pressure. Before working with her, I knew, in a vague sort of way, that I had been emotionally abused as a child. Now I see that what my dad did to me was deliberate and cruel. I’m also coming to accept that he abused me physically by making demands upon my body that I wasn’t physically mature enough to do. I’ve considered what you told me about feeling broken and in need of fixing when you were a little boy. In his own way, my father made me feel broken, too.”

“It’s not a good feeling. Is it?”

“No.” Erin wished she could lean on the fence as he was doing, but he would be unable to read her lips. “Looking back, I realize now that I constantly tried to fix myself to please my dad. No matter how well I performed, he never praised me, and I became compulsive about pushing even harder to become something I could never be.”

“The son he wanted,” Wyatt supplied.

“I believe Violet was punished in awful ways for not being what her last owner wanted her to be. When you can never measure up, when you can never please your taskmaster, it sticks with you, and when you’re pressured in some way later to perform, you feel panicky and just react. Violet does that, and so do I.” Erin gazed off at nothing for a moment and then faced him again. “Unfortunately, seeing the similarities between myself and the horse is only a small victory in a huge battle for me. I did feel broken as a child, and deep down, I still do. Until I began sessions with Jonas, I spent my whole life trying to fix myself in all the wrong ways. I felt that I’d been born in the wrong body. I even felt that my emotional responses to life were wrong. Under Jonas’s guidance, I tried to stop acting masculine. I struggled to accept myself as I was. And I was doing pretty well until I switched jobs.”