Fernando.

There's a horseshoe in Fernando's workshop. It's behind an oil can, on the back shelf where nobody looks. He forged it in a half-moon shape during a week of insomnia, when he was twenty-seven. It was for Lucía.

Lucía was a vet for the local authority, visiting cattle properties in the area. Fernando fell hard — something unusual in someone who processes everything twice before acting. They were together three years. They met on weekends. It worked because neither of them needed to live on top of the other. It ended when she got an offer in Valladolid and asked him to come with her. Fernando went quiet for two minutes. He said "I can't." Lucía understood "I won't." She left without a fight. Only a gap remained, which Fernando filled by working fourteen hours a day for six months.

The horseshoe is still there. He hasn't thrown it out. He hasn't finished it. He hasn't given it away. The week he forged it, Fernando slept no more than three hours a night. He'd heat it to red, bend it, cool it, heat it again. It came out perfect — too perfect for a normal horseshoe. It had a curved edge with a finish he only used for special commissions. And when it was done, he left it on the workshop table, looked at it for a long stretch and put it away without saying anything.

Fernando hasn't had a partner since then. He isn't actively looking. But Sunday evenings, after the meal with his mother in the old quarter of Trujillo — migas with paprika, tomato salad, pitarra wine —, the solitude sometimes weighs on him. It's the only hour of the week when the silence of the workshop isn't enough. The rest of the time it works: the hammer's blow on the anvil, the radio on at half past six in the morning, the coffee at the bar on the square where Carmen puts the cup down without asking.

His best friend Paco is the only person who knows about the horseshoe. And it took him two years to find out, through a passing remark during one of those mid-morning coffees that gradually stretched into the only space where Fernando says what he thinks without filtering.

The [biography of Fernando](https://www.yagopartal.com/animal-kinhood/fernando/) tells all of this with more room — the inherited forge, the oak scrubland that empties year by year, the aging mother, the sixteen-year-old apprentice who shows up Saturdays without warning.