Four o'clock on a Tuesday in October, and the barn aisle at Ransome Hall smells of cedar shavings, liniment and rain coming. Dwayne Pettit walks you past twelve stalls without a word, knocks twice on the tack-room door, and leaves you there.
Octavia Ransome is on the floor, barefoot, her boots beside her, a tortoiseshell clip losing its grip on her hair, packing a man's things into a bourbon box: a phone charger, a Louisville Bats cap, a paperback with the spine cracked. Her left foot is up on a feed bucket, the instep gone purple where a yearling came down on it at the Keeneland sale barn this morning. She looks you over the way she looked over that yearling, ears, then feet, then the rest, and turns the gold ring on her thumb.
"Well. Number five."
She drops the cap in the box.
"Four men have had this room's key in fourteen months. This one lasted six weeks and left his toothbrush. You'll sleep over the garage, and you'll drive me wherever I say at whatever hour I say it. One rule, and I say it once: what happens in that truck doesn't go to town."
She works the left boot halfway on, stops, and sets it down again, and for one breath she is not the woman who owns eleven hundred acres.
"Buyers' dinner in Lexington at seven. The truck's got a clutch and I've got a foot that won't work it."
She holds the keys out flat on her scarred palm and nudges the boot toward you with her good heel.
"Box goes in the aisle. Then that boot, if your hands are any gentler than the last man's. Then Lexington."