“But only half. She’s a single mom.” Dakota shrugged off his suit jacket, which had grown too warm in the tight space, folded it, and twisted to lay it across the back of his chair. Maybe the heat was why Benny looked sweaty. “She has young kids. Preschoolers. They’re her main focus. Rightly so. It makes scheduling much outside of the occasional lunch difficult.”
“You like the kids?” Benny asked.
“Neither one of us is comfortable with my meeting them, what with where our relationship stands. Right now, we’re keeping each other company. Nothing big.”
“Good guy here,” Benny smacked his hand on Jasper’s desk. “He’s got his priorities lined up right.”
Dakota shifted his focus to Jasper. “Right now, my priority is to get out there with Tank, let him get some on-the-job training, get his nose certified, and get out in the field.”
“Turn you into a pair of mock pirates,” Benny chuckled.
“How’s that?” Jasper asked.
“Sending them off looking for fool’s gold.”
Chapter Four
Rylee
Monday
The doctor’s office was freezing cold.
Yes, it was March, and while one day smelled like spring and felt warm with burgeoning hope, the next smelled like a snowstorm was ice skating down from the north.
Yesterday, Washington, D.C., was glorious. Today? Not so much.
Rylee Jones had dressed appropriately for the ice-spitting drizzle. But here in the doctor’s exam room, she sat as requested: stripped down to her underwear, a pink napkin of a “modesty garment” stiffly resting on her shoulders and wrapping her torso, sitting on the padded table, her bare legs dangling from the side. Honestly, the rooms should be warm enough to keep the patients’ toes from turning purple and skin from stippling with goose bumps.
And, if nothing else, the doctor should be heading through the door to make the discomfort short-lived.
But no.
Rylee had been shivering for forty-five minutes now.
With her coat hanging up in the lobby, Rylee had resorted to draping her sweater dress over her legs and was deciding whether to go ahead and pull it over her head and run out real quick to grab her coat.
Honestly, the warmest Rylee had been was during this morning’s trek from her office at WorldCares, where she’d parked her car, to the medical building. Though outside the ice was pinging, it was probably warmer than this icebox of a room.
Rylee was in a bad mood and grousing. The cold room was simply an easy reason to vent frustration. And if she ran out to get the coat at the same time the doctor popped in, she’d probably miss her opportunity to be seen and have to set a new appointment and go through this all again.
“Suck it up,” she chided herself. “Power through.” After all, Rylee had been through colder and for longer.
The determined conquered the day.
Turning to her phone, Rylee sank herself into a good doom scroll, immersing herself in a post from the Muddy K9 Charity Run she’d gone to with her dad and foster brother the day before. Videos of the athletes and their dogs streaking by took her attention from a clock that seemed as frozen as the tip of her nose.
When the tap finally sounded at the door, Rylee had been in her shiver-clench so long that her “Come in” was a staccato ratatat she forced through chattering teeth.
“I’m Rose, Dr. Blanch’s nurse.” Rose wore a turtleneck and a thick fleece sweatshirt with the clinic’s logo. Her hands still looked stiff with cold.
“It’s ffff-rrr-eezing,” Rylee said, because there should be some conversation about a patient’s comfort. Unless, of course, they were trying to dissuade patients from coming in.
“The doctor’s running a bit behind. I’ll try to get you out of here fast. Can you tell me what’s going on for you today?”
Rylee reached for the spreadsheet she’d prepared and was lying beside her. On it, Rylee had listed all the data points that had come up in the last couple of years from previous medical appointments with an ever-growing list of doctors who shrugged and walked away.
Every time she got a new question, she added another category to the printout: her exercise regimen, nutrition pattern, years of blood work, her symptoms, their frequency,their impact on her day-to-day life, her family history of Multiple Sclerosis, the family members’ ages of onset and diagnosis, and their current level of disability.
