If not…She hurried across the front lawn, feeling about as lithe and agile as a watermelon. She’d once been a track star in high school and later at U.C. Berkeley. She’d been able to sprint so fast, she’d felt at certain blissful moments as if the wind carried her.

But now? She could still run, but the pace had no familiarity with wind-assisted agility, and her litheness was tempered by a paranoia that with every step she was going to inadvertently cause herself to miscarry. The doctor had assured her that wasn’t going to happen, that she could still run as long as she felt good doing so, but pregnancy was doing crazy things to her brain. She was hyperaware that another being’s life depended on her completely. Frankly, the pressure was getting to her.

Behind Soleil, Malcolm, one of her current interns from Oakland, plodded along, apparently not wanting to seem as if he cared about anything in the world. It wasn’t cool to hurry, and especially not for a lost goat.

“How did the goat get away from you?” she called over her shoulder.

“How should I know?” came Malcolm’s surly answer.

“Where’s Silas?”

Silas was her cattle dog, a mostly Australian shepherd fully capable of managing a herd of goats on his own without any help from the teens.

“Tonio’s afraid of dogs.”

Right. She’d confined Silas to the barn due to the boy’s sheer terror at the sight of him. But she’d probably find the missing goat a lot faster with the dog’s help.

“Tell Tonio to go inside so I can let the dog out, okay?”

“Okay,” Malcolm said, and sauntered toward the field, clearly happy to get out of the goat-searching mission.

She went into the barn and called for the dog, then told him to find the lost goat. He didn’t need any further coaxing. He simply watched her face as she talked, with his eerily smart blue eyes, then took off at a full run.