I heard his engine start, and the headlights swept across the front of the house. Then he was gone, taillights disappearing down the street, and I was alone.
I didn't get up.
I just lay there in the doorway of my own house, cheek pressed to the floor, blood spreading warm under my face. I stared at the ceiling and listened to the quiet. The boiler clicked on in the hallway, steady and indifferent, like the rest of the world was already moving on without me.
I thought about the man I used to be. The man who pressed his uniform and showed up early and believed he was one of the good ones.
I had no idea where he'd gone.
Maybe he'd been gone a long time, and I was only now catching up.
CHAPTER 11: ELENA
The goat didn't want to cooperate.
She was a young Nigerian Dwarf, caramel and white, with horizontal pupils that tracked me like I was the enemy. Her owner—a teenage girl named Becca who'd driven her here in the back of a Honda Civic—stood in the corner of the exam room wringing her hands.
"She's not usually like this," Becca said. "She's really sweet, I swear."
"They never are," I said. "And they always are."
Dad was on the other side of the table, holding the goat steady while I tried to get a look at her hoof. She'd been limping for two days, and Becca was convinced it was something terrible. Maybe bone cancer or a fracture, the beginning of the end. It was probably hoof rot. It was almost always hoof rot.
"Easy, girl," I murmured. "Easy. I'm not going to hurt you."
The goat bleated and tried to kick me in the chest.
"She likes you," Dad said drily.
I managed to get the hoof up, cleaned away the mud and debris, and found exactly what I expected. Soft, black tissue between the toes. The distinctive and unpleasant smell hit me a second later.
"Hoof rot," I said. "We'll trim it back, treat it with some zinc sulfate, and she'll be fine. Keep her somewhere dry for the next few weeks."
Becca's face flooded with relief. "Oh thank God. I thought… I was so scared she was…"
"She's going to be fine," I said. "Goats are tougher than they look."
I caught Dad's eye across the table and he gave me the smallest nod. Approval, or maybe pride. Something warm I hadn't seen directed at me in a while.
It felt good, like fitting into a space I didn't know was waiting for me.
I'd been here four days now. Four days of sleeping in my childhood bedroom, eating breakfast with my father, trying not to think about the life I'd left behind. The first day I’d kept it together just enough to eat breakfast with Dad and visit the cemetery, but it was all a blur. Then, on the second, I'd wandered the house like a ghost, picking things up and putting them down, unable to settle.
By the third day, I needed to move and do something with my hands before I lost my mind.
"Let me help," I'd told Dad over coffee. "At the clinic. I can't just sit here."
He'd looked at me for a long moment, reading me the way he always did, and nodded. "Could use an extra set of hands."
So here I was.
Dad's clinic wasn't much to look at. It never had been, but the years had worn on it harder than I remembered. The linoleum was cracked and peeling in the corners, the fluorescent lights buzzed and flickered, and half the equipment was older than I was: the autoclave, the X-ray machine, the dental scaler he'd bought second-hand more than thirty years ago and kept running through sheer stubbornness.
The waiting room had six chairs, four of which matched. The walls were covered in faded photos of patients: cows, horses, dogs, cats, a pot-bellied pig named Hamlet who'd been dead for fifteen years… The owner still sent Dad a Christmas card every year.
It was small and outdated. It was nothing like the sleek, modern clinic I'd helped Angela build in the city.
But the animals didn't care about the linoleum. And neither, I was finding, did I.
