“Not even a little.”
And the conversation restarts.
We’re an hour in when he tells me about the dog. It comes up because I ask what he does when he leaves the hospital and doesn’t feel like going home. The question hangs there for a second, heavier than the others. I don’t know if he lives alone. I don’t know if Amber ever really moved out of his shadow.
“I feed a stray,” he says finally.
I blink. “Excuse me?”
“A stray dog,” he clarifies. “He lives in the alley behind the hospital.”
“Does he have a name?”
“Scout.”
I smile into the phone. “You named him.”
“He refused to respond to anything else.”
“That’s not how dogs work. They respond to food.”
“Can’t speak for other dogs. But it’s how it works with him.”
He tells me Scout showed up last winter. Mangy. Suspicious. Thin but not starving. He started leaving scraps. Then soup. Apparently, Scout likes soup.
“Soup,” I repeat.
“Chicken noodle. No onions.”
“You cook for him?”
“I buy it.”
“That’s adorable.”
He ignores that. “He stays in the alley. I’ve tried taking him home.”
“And?”
“He stopped eating.” The softness in his voice when he says that makes something tighten in my chest. “I took him to a vet. No injuries. No illness. The vet said some dogs get used to being outside. Being alone. Territory matters to them. I took him out of his territory and put him into mine, and he didn’t like that.”
“So you let him stay at the hospital?”
“I feed him. I bring a ball sometimes. We throw it until I get paged or, if it’s after my shift, I throw it until I’m too tired to keep going.”
I lean back against the wall, Nicholas finally asleep against my shoulder. “You’re kind of perfect,” I say before I can stop myself.
He goes quiet for a second. “Not remotely.”
“You feed a stray dog soup.”
He exhales. “That’s a low bar for perfection.”
“It isn’t. I promise you that.”
“You’re charitable, Perry.”
There’s a silence that feels different. Warmer. More personal.
