My Groom Walked Out, So His Brother Took His Place novel · Chapter 4 of 32

Chapter 4: Hold the Light

Bryn's POV

On Monday I went to work.

I put on my coveralls, wound my braid into a knot and drove my truck to the clinic with a sandwich on the dash.

Nobody had told me how many people could ask "How are you?" in one morning with their eyebrows doing something else.

The Express-News photographer was waiting in the gravel lot.

He was twenty-five and sweating, and he wanted me to hold a stethoscope to a goat.

"Smile," he said. "You're a newlywed."

"I'm on call," I said. "Hold still, Mr. Peppers."

The goat did not smile either.

By noon the clinic phone had rung forty times, and nine of the calls were for me about animals.

By four, an old rancher had come in with a sick cow and spent twenty minutes telling me how sorry he was, which cost him an hour of the cow's life.

I told him the cow came first.

At seven that evening, in a clean shirt, I got the call I wasn't ready for.

"Dr. Roane, it's Jude Stehling," said a flat voice. "I've got a heifer down in the east barn. First calf. She's been pushing for two hours and nothing's coming."

I closed my eyes.

I had been keeping the terms in a very small box in my head, and this call opened it.

"Is there anybody else on the ranch who can help?" I asked.

"Not anybody who knows how," Jude said.

"Is she bleeding?"

"A little."

I said, "I'm coming."

It was a twenty-minute drive.

I thought the whole way about how I would walk into that barn.

I would be professional.

I would not think about forty buttons.

The east barn was a long steel shed with a concrete aisle and four pens down one side.

The heifer lay in the last pen on her side, heaving.

Jude stood at her head in his work jeans and a gray shirt, with a lamp in his hand.

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