I drive to town with the windows down and my jaw locked.
Kellan’s office is small, clean, smelling of disinfectant and hay. I park out front and sit in the truck for a minute, doing the math. Eighty-five pounds. Three steps up to the door. My leg is already spent from the cabin.
I’m working out the angles when someone knocks on my window.
Red hair. Green eyes. The clinic must be visible from here, or maybe she was on her way to work, or maybe the universe has decided that this woman is going to keep appearing in my peripheral vision until I stop pretending I don’t see her.
Bianca is standing beside my truck with a paper bag in one hand and concern written across her face, sharpened by that focused attention I’ve started recognizing as her default setting.
I roll down the window.
“Is he okay?” she asks. Not hi or good morning, or any of the pleasantries that most people use to fill the space before they get to what they mean. She’s looking past me at Chief, reading him the way she reads a patient chart. Fast. Accurate.
“Front paw,” I say. “Swollen. Kellan’s going to look at it.”
She nods. Glances at the steps to Kellan’s door. Glances at me. At my leg. And I see the calculation happen in real time. The nurse’s brain running the same math I just ran: eighty-five pounds, three steps, one bad leg.
She doesn’t say any of it.
“Can I help you get him inside?”
There’s no pity in it. No performance. She’s offering the way she offered to carry firewood. Practical. Matter-of-fact. Help without strings, because she doesn’t know how to attach them.
I should say no. I should say I’ve got it, the same way I’ve said it to everyone about everything for four years.
“Yeah,” I say. “That’d help.”
The words taste foreign. A language I used to speak and have forgotten.
She sets the paper bag on the hood of my truck and comes around to the passenger side. Chief lifts his head when she opens the door. His tail moves once. That careful, deliberate wag he only gives her.
“Hey, buddy,” she says, soft. “Let’s get you looked at.”
She slides her arms under his chest the way someone who knows animals does. Supports his weight against her body. I come around and take his hindquarters, and together we lift him out of the truck and carry him up the steps, and the whole time she’s talking to him in a low, steady murmur that settles somewhere behind my ribs.
Chief rests his head against her shoulder.
I almost stop walking.
Kellan is efficient and thorough and doesn’t waste a single word, which makes him one of the few people in this town I can stand for more than ten minutes. He examines Chief’s paw with careful hands, bending the joint, palpating the swelling. Chiefholds still. Seven years of military discipline doesn’t leave a dog, even in a vet’s office.
“Sprain,” Kellan says. “Nothing torn. Rest and anti-inflammatories. Keep him off it for a week.” He looks up at me with dark, unreadable eyes. “He’s not young anymore, Hawthorne. Start thinking about joint supplements.”
I nod and don’t want to think about Chief not being young anymore. Or think about the number seven and what it means for a German Shepherd and how many years that math leaves me.
Bianca is in the waiting room when I come out. She didn’t leave. I expected her to leave. She should be at the clinic, not sitting in a plastic chair with her hands folded in her lap, waiting for a man and a dog who aren’t her responsibility.
“Just a sprain,” I tell her.
Something loosens in her face. Relief. Actual relief for a dog she’s met three times.
“Good,” she says. “That’s good.”
We carry Chief back to the truck together. She’s careful with him. Careful with me, too, staying on my right side, matching her pace to mine without making it obvious. The same thing she did with the firewood. Quiet consideration that costs her nothing and costs me everything, because I don’t know what to do with someone who pays that kind of attention.
I should say thank you and go home.
“I have coffee at the cabin,” I say instead, and the words are out before I’ve decided to say them. “If you want. Before you go back to work.”
