But Buff’s tail is wagging like he’s lost every last functioning brain cell he ever had.
“I’m just saying… we hide you in plain sight, and while she’s working with you, Froggy and I get fake IDs and figure out how to smuggle you across the border.”With each word, his voice brightens with insane, reckless hope.“No one suspects a guide dog. No one hunts a guide dog.”
“We are not turning Jason into a pet!”Froggy screams, fur bristling so violently he looks static-charged.
“Not a pet,”Buff counters.“A partner.”
The word hits me dead center, hard and unavoidable.
Oh!
It lands in my chest like someone punched straight into the part of me I never let anyone near.
Partner.
My breath stutters because there’s a difference, and we all feel it. A pet is owned. A partner chooses. And the horrifying, impossible truth vibrating under my skin?
Some part of me had already chosen.
Chapter 8
Violet
The knock at my door is not friendly. It’s not an “I brought muffins” knock. It’s “open up before I knock this entire house off its foundations” knock. Sam always does a quick courtesy tap, and Hattie… well, since she stitched me up a couple of weeks ago, she knocks by yelling she’s here, then helping herself to my coffee machine. But this? This is a steady bashing from someone with knuckles the size of grapefruits and zero interest in subtlety. My door groans like it’s reconsidering its life choices.
Honestly? Same.
Or maybe it’s just my sensory system playing up.
It does that sometimes—spikes and dips for no reason, like someone keeps messing with the dials behind my ribs. And it doesn’t surprise me, since I barely slept last night. My brain kept looping back to him. My rescuer. That enormous, impossibly gentle dog.
Every time I drifted toward sleep, I felt him again. The weight of warm fur under my hands, the low, worried whine he made when I couldn’t breathe, the way his presence pressed against my panic until it cracked apart.
But what haunts me most is the calm. God, that calm. It didn’t make sense then, and it makes even less sense now. How can a dog I’ve never met before slow the spiral better than every breathing exercise, every grounding trick, every therapy script I’ve rehearsed for a year? It’s been twelve months of feeling jagged and broken and too small for my life. Twelve months of fighting my own body just to stand. Twelve months of trying to remember what safety even feels like.
And then one moment, one heartbeat, one terrified breath, one huge, quiet creature leaning into me and suddenly I felt… steadier.
Who the hell finds peace in the middle of a panic attack?
I guess I did. And now I want that feeling back. That impossible sense that, for a few stolen minutes, I wasn’t drowning. I don’t know what that means. But I know it means something.
I count the steps from my couch like a kid reciting a rhyme.
One, two, three… because pretending I’ve got this under control is better than admitting I don’t.
My fingers find the doorframe, then the handle, the metal cool and unforgiving against my palm. I grip it harder than necessary, willing my knees not to wobble. God, I hate wobbling. It makes me feel like my fear is visible.
I know it’s stupid to be scared, but years of living in the city carved that fear into my bones. Checking peepholes. Double-locking doors. Holding my breath in elevators. Listening for footsteps behind me. Fear wasn’t a feeling back then, it was a lifestyle. A damn roommate. After the accident, it only got worse.
Moving out here was supposed to fix that. The quiet streets and fresh air. Space to breathe and neighbors who want to borrow sugar instead of rob you.
But apparently, I packed my trauma right along with my kitchen bowls, because here I am, standing in my home in a peaceful little town, hand trembling on a door like I’m about to let a murderer inside.
And with nothing but guesswork and four inches of wood between me and…
No. Don’t say it, Violet. Don’t say Michael Myers.
Argh, goddamn it, that’s exactly what I said not to say. And now the thought’s loose, running laps in my head, dragging every horror movie I’ve ever seen behind it like a float parade.
