“What brings you here?”
“I need to talk to you.” She leaned in closer to look at one photo. “I ran into Giselle on the way up.”
I sat back in my chair, curious to know where this would go. “She was just here for a meeting.”
“Is she married?”
“Is who married?”
She turned and looked over her shoulder at me. “Giselle.” Then she looked back at the photo. “Who are these people?”
“I have no idea.”
She looked back at me. “Which question did you just answer?”
I could feel my lips twitch. I was enjoying this conversation way too much. “Both.”
She gave a little shrug and moved onto my bookshelf that was stocked mostly with SOPs and financial ledgers. Then, she looked around the entire room, her face genuinely curious. “What exactly do you do here?”
She was wandering into dangerous territory. “Do you want to tell me why you’re here?”
A wave of excitement crossed her face as she remembered the reason for her visit. “Remember the other night when you told me I could get a dog?”
I couldn’t get that night out of my head. “I remember telling you that we’d talk about it.”
She rolled her eyes. “You also said you’d come home the next day to talk. That was over a week ago.”
“So let’s talk.”
I watched in fascination as her entire demeanor changed as she stood beside me and opened her phone. She became giddy and gushy and softer than soft. “Okay, his name is Bandit and he’s an Australian shepherd cross. He needs a lot of exercise because his first rescue owner, who was really nice, got in a terrible car crash and was forced to surrender Bandit after they bonded. And Bandit missed him so much that he hasn’t bonded with anyone else.”
“What does that mean?”
“He’s been adopted twice more, but each time the families brought him back.”
That didn’t sound good at all. “Why did they bring him back?”
She waved her hand around with indifference. “Everyone said he was a bad dog and had some destructive tendencies and some resource guarding and issues with other dogs and cats and small children, but they made him out to be totally evil. I know he’s sweet.” She stepped closer with her phone and started scrolling through photos. “Oh my god, look how cute he is here. Look at his ears.”
Bandit looked rough, grumpy and sullen, like a hard time criminal in a series of mug shots.
“Look at him smiling here.” Mila flipped to a photo of Bandit baring his teeth at the camera with menace.
“He looks pissed.” I looked down at my wife to see if she was messing with me. She couldn’t possibly be serious.
“That’s how he smiles,” she insisted.
I pulled her phone closer. Bandit looked like an escaped convict. “Don’t you want a puppy or something a bit smaller? How much does he weigh?”
“Well, the shelter said he’s about sixty pounds, but they think he’s crossed with something bigger and that he’s underweight. He needs to gain ten pounds or so.”
“What’s he crossed with?”
“A rottweiler.”
I squinted at the photo. “Are those scars on his face?”
Her expression was one of tragic empathy. “He was part of a vicious dogfighting ring before he got rescued the first time.”
