“Is it, though?” Jade’s voice stayed gentle, but there was something sharper underneath. “It sounds like you trust Zeus with your life. That’s not simple. That’s profound.”
Maddox felt her defenses rising like hackles, the need to shut this down before it went any further. “Animals don’t lie. They don’t have agendas, or—” She stopped herself, but it was too late. The sentence hung unfinished between them, and Jade’s knowing look said she’d heard the rest of it anyway.
They don’t leave.
“People are harder to trust,” Jade said quietly. It wasn’t a question.
Maddox said nothing. Silence was safer than agreement, and agreement felt too much like vulnerability.
Jade leaned back in her chair, her posture relaxed despite the tension thickening the air. “You know, I was an Army medic for six years, and I learned pretty quickly that you had to trust the people around you from corpsmen, infantry, K-9 units. Lives depended on it.”
The shift to shared experience was deliberate, and Maddox recognized it for the tactic it was. But something in her chest loosened slightly anyway, the way it always did when she talked to another veteran. The language was different with people who’d been there. Fewer words were needed. There was less explaining.
“Marines don’t trust Army medics,” Maddox said, her tone flat but edged with the barest hint of dry humor.
Jade’s mouth quirked at the corner. “Marines don’t trust anyone except other Marines. Sometimes not even then.”
“It’s a smart policy.”
“Is it smart?” Jade’s expression turned serious again. “Or is it just lonely?”
The question hit like a jab to the ribs, unexpected and too accurate. Maddox felt her walls slam back up, steel reinforced and impenetrable. She was done with this, done with being poked and prodded, and seen.
“Are we done?” she asked, her voice growing cold.
Jade glanced at the clock on the wall. “We have twenty minutes left.”
Twenty minutes. Maddox could sit here for twenty more minutes without saying another word. She’d done harder things than enduring silence with a therapist who thought she could crack Maddox open with sincere questions and shared military service.
She settled back in her chair, crossed her arms over her chest, and fixed her gaze somewhere past Jade’s left shoulder. The succulent on the window was thriving—probably the kind of plant that didn’t need much attention, that did better when left alone. Maddox could relate.
To her relief, Jade didn’t push. She just sat there with her notepad and patient expression, occasionally writing something down, letting the scratch of pen on paper fill the room like water rising. Zeus sighed heavily at Maddox’s feet, his way of commenting on the sudden tension, and Maddox dropped one hand to rest on his head. His fur was warm and soft under her palm, grounding her when everything else felt unsteady.
The minutes crawled past. Maddox counted them by the clock on the wall: fifteen left, then ten, then five. Outside the office, the sounds of the precinct continued, normal work happening while she sat here wasting time she could be spending on patrol.
When the clock finally hit 2:50 p.m., Jade closed her notepad and stood. “Same time next week, Officer Shaw.”
Maddox was on her feet before Jade finished the sentence, Zeus rising smoothly beside her. She nodded once, a curt but professional nod, and headed for the door.
“Maddox.”
She stopped mid-stride and looked back.
“You showed up,” Jade said quietly. “That matters.”
Maddox breathed forcefully through her nose and turned around, opening the door and walking out without responding. Zeus fell into step at her side as always. The hallway was blindingly bright with the afternoon sun streaming through the windows, and she blinked against her. She massaged the small of her jaw with her right hand. After almost an hour of it being clenched to prevent her from revealing more, it ached.
Therapy was helping, that was a fact. It was just annoying. Just one more obligation, one more hour of someone trying to get inside her head where they didn’t belong. And the worst part, the part that made her hands curl into fists, was that she couldn’t stop thinking about it afterward.
Her voice replayed in her memory:“Animals don’t lie. They don’t have agendas, or?—”
Except even though she didn’t finish the sentence, she knew that Jade knew what she was going to say. Jade had heard all of it, every word Maddox hadn’t said, and that knowing look in her eyes had been unbearable. Like she could see straight through the mask Maddox had spent eight years building, like all that armor she’d been wrapping herself in was transparent.
Zeus pressed even closer as they walked, his shoulder brushing her leg with every step, and Maddox let herself take comfort from it. He was real and solid and simple. He didn’t make her dredge up memories and talk about things she’d buried so deep they should’ve suffocated by now.
He just walked beside her, steady and reliable, the only relationship that had never asked her to be anything other than who she was. And if that made her pathetic, then so be it. She’d be pathetic, but at least she’d be functional.
The K-9 building’s door swung shut behind them with a heavy thud, closing out the afternoon sun and the nagging voice in her head that sounded uncomfortably like Jade’s:Is it smart? Or is it lonely?
