“There’s nothing wrong with gentleness,” he says at last. He squeezes Robbie’s knee again, smiling with unmistakable pride. “You shouldn’t compromise with your heart, son. Not if you can help it.”

It’s a conversation that Robbie will think back on again and again. One of those moments in youth that strikes your heart in ways you’re not yet ready to grasp, so your mind holds onto the memory for you, until the day comes when you’re ready to learn the lesson it was waiting to teach you.

Today.

Lance’s voice from the bathroom doorway startles Robbie so much that he nearly loses his grip on the slippery calf, but he keeps her positioned after a moment of unsteadiness.

Robbie is kneeling on the floor with his sleeves rolled up to his elbows, his coat discarded on the floor. The bathtub is half-full of steaming water, and Robbie is carefully holding the calf with both hands so that her head stays above water.

He looks over his shoulder with a smile that’s probably more like a grimace.

“I remember my dad doing this, but I guess I didn’t totally think it through before I started. Can you reach by me and turn off the water? I need both hands to keep a hold of her.”

Even immersed in the warm water, the calf is almost totally listless. From what Robbie can tell, the cow delivered her onto the ice and was then unable to do much more than halfheartedly lick her clean while her wet coat fused to the frozen ground. Calves being born on cold ground is a common hazard of winter calving, but if owners have any sense, they keep any cow that might be close to the end of a pregnancy near a good source of shelter and check on her often.

Ed, obviously, has no sense.

That being said, if a cow chooses the wrong spot to drop a calf, even an attentive rancher can lose a newborn. Robbie has a few memories of tiny calves being bundled up next to the fireplace in the old house while his father kept watch from the sofa, a blanket in his lap and a book in his hand. He’d stay up late into the night after everyone else was in bed, occasionally carting the calf out to drink from its mother, or hydrating powdered milk in the kitchen sink and pouring the concoction into the calf with a tube.

Those memories are the closest thing Robbie has to training when it comes to something like this. They’ve hardly prepared him to save a calf himself.

Lance reaches past him and turns the hot water tap to the right, leaving just a trickle of cold that feels like ice where it hits Robbie’s steam-warmed elbow. Lance grasps the other tap, standing at Robbie’s back and leaning over him. His body is long and hard, and might as well be spun from lightning, the way Robbie feels a jolt of heat under his skin everywhere they brush against each other.