“What do you mean, we can’t?” Grandmother said.
“Daniel is more afraid of the government than ever,” I said.
I didn’t feel as though I’d betrayed his confidence.
“So what are we supposed to do?” Grandmother said.
“Wait,” I said.
“Not my strong suit,” she said.
“You know it’s not mine,” I said.
Mom watched me in the ring with Coronado both days that Daniel had been gone. She said that as concerned as we were about Daniel, we all had to be practical. Coronado and I were competing in the International Arena on Thursday afternoon. With or without Daniel. As long as Mom and I stayed inside the ring, things still felt normal.
After I fed Coronado a carrot, Emilio took him back inside the barn. Grandmother had left for a doctor’s appointment, saying she wanted her blood pressure checked, “for obvious reasons.”
Where was he?
Why hadn’t he even called?
“Don’t you have that Find My Friends app on your phone?” Mom said.
“He won’t let me use it with his phone,” I said.
“Why not?”
“Because he’s Daniel,” I said.
“Say he is in trouble with the government, even being detained somewhere, wouldn’t he have called us for help?” she said.
“He doesn’t ever ask anybody for help,” I said.
“What can we do, besides wait?”
“Try to find him,” I said.
I’d waited as long as I could. But we were moving up on forty-eight hours since I’d heard from him last. Emilio had already sworn to me that he hadn’t heard from Daniel and didn’t know where he might have gone.
At the horse show I had met Daniel’s trainer and groom friends from the other barns. Most but not all of them were immigrants. So they had their secrets, too. But maybe one of them knew Daniel’s secrets, where he’d gone, when he might be coming back, and if he was safe.
If.
By the midafternoon, Emilio and I’d made a tour of eight barns in our general area. We spoke to trainers and grooms and some riders, giving them my cell phone number but trying not to sound any alarms. Trying not to let them see that I was worried out of my skull.
But nobody we spoke to had seen him. Nobody had heard from him.
Totally off the grid for two days now.
Where was he?
I told Emilio, who was as afraid of the government as Daniel was, that my own worst fear was that he was at some detention center and they hadn’t even allowed him a phone call.
“He will explain when he returns,” Emilio said.
“If he returns,” I said.
I kept calling Daniel’s phone. Kept texting. We took one last swing by Daniel’s house. Nobody home. He knew how much the qualifier on Thursday meant to all of us. Something bad had to have happened.
Please don’t let it be bad.
We were back to that.
By five o’clock we returned to Atwood Farm, exhausted.
Mom and Grandmother invited me to dinner. I told them I’d be terrible company.
“You’re going to sit at home and worry yourself sick,” Mom said.
“Sounds like a plan,” I said.
They didn’t leave until a little after eight, later than I preferred to eat. I was up in my room by then, anxiously texting and calling Daniel again and again. I went downstairs, poured myself a glass of white wine, brought it back up to the room. Tried and failed to follow a book and then a Netflix movie. Realized I hadn’t touched my wine. Picked up the glass, put it down hard enough that I spilled some.
Screw it.
I was going to take one last drive over to his house. Picturing myself pulling off Pierson and seeing the house lit up and the Kia parked in his driveway. Picturing myself ripping into him for disappearing this way.
I stuffed my phone into my back pocket, grabbed my car keys, took the stairs two at a time.
When I opened our front door, there he was.
THIRTY-THREE
Daniel
HE HAD BEEN rehearsing on the long ride back to Wellington what he was going to say to Becky, provided she did not slam the door right in his face. But when he saw her right there in front of him, it was as if all the words drained from his head.
It was not the first time with Becky that he had lost his words, though never in the ring. He would never completely understand her, no matter how long they were together. But by now he knew her, sometimes better than she knew herself, as annoyed as she would get when he would say that to her.
He had never told her of so many times when he felt…what was the expression?