Emilia had a sudden and vivid picture of how she would have reacted as a student to a ride-along with Morgan. Buckets of drool would undoubtedly have been involved. And swooning. She met Morgan’s eyes, and Morgan seemed to guess her thoughts because she grinned. The flash of white teeth calmed her. This did not, after all, need to be as big a deal as she was making it. Downed horses were tricky, and they might very well need a hand to get the mare back on her feet. She was simply fulfilling the oath she’d taken when she became a vet.

They pulled into a small but neatly maintained farmstead fifteen minutes later. Sheep dotted the hillside pasture, and a woman stood waiting outside the red barn doors. Morgan opened Emilia’s door for her, and before Emilia had time to register whether or not the gesture irritated her, Morgan touched her arm.

“Are you up for this?”

“I’ll find out,” she said. Morgan squeezed her forearm and looked as if she wanted to say more, but didn’t.

“Dr. Donovan,” said the stocky woman Emilia assumed was Abby. “Thank you for coming.”

“Of course. Where is she?”

“The back paddock.”

Stevie had her hands shoved deeply into her pockets and a worried expression on her face as she fell into step behind Morgan with Emilia.

The back paddock was small, and it was clear that Olive had done her best to eliminate every single blade of grass.

“I took her off pasture because she was getting fat, and this afternoon I came out and found her like this.”

A Belgian mare sat in the dirt, more like a dog than a horse. Emilia recognized the symptom. The horse raised her head at their approach but made no move to stand.

“How long do you estimate she’s been like this?” asked Morgan.

“She was up this morning, but didn’t eat all her breakfast. I thought that was unusual, and I ran some errands, then came home to keep an eye on her. She’s gotten up a few times, but she keeps biting at her sides and rolling. She’s been sitting like this for about an hour.”

Morgan walked around the horse while Stevie knelt at her head, whispering something to her. Emilia cast her mind around for what she remembered about colic. It could be caused by any number of things, ranging from a buildup of gas to an infarction. With luck, this would just be an impaction—perhaps the result of ingesting too much sand from the paddock.

“Let’s get some blood; then we’ll try and get her up.” Morgan joined Stevie at the head and accepted the vacutainer collection needle Stevie handed her. The mare didn’t move as Morgan held the tubes up to the vacutainer to fill them, but her sides heaved, and sweat soaked her shoulders and flanks. Classic signs of pain.