“We’re going to talk, Andrea,” he said behind me.
“Have a good afternoon, sir.”
The doors closed between us.
I went straight to Bonalisa. Mary took one look at my face and put down the intake forms.
“What happened?”
I told her everything I could without mentioning wolves. The weeks of silence from Lorraine, the sudden return, the hour-long office visit, the arm, the performance. Him looking at me with guilt and then walking past without a word.
Mary listened and her face went hard. “That son of a bitch.”
“Excuse me?” Peter called from the back.
“Not you, baby, you’re an angel. I’m talking about the other one.”
“The worst part is I can’t even be mad at her,” I said. “She did exactly what she always does. The person who was supposed to stop it was him and he didn’t.” I looked around the shelter. “You got anything that needs cleaning? I need to do something with my hands before I break something that matters.”
“Are you sure? You could just sit and vent. I’ve got wine in the back.”
“Give me a scrub brush and point me at the dirtiest kennel you’ve got.”
Mary raised her eyebrows but handed me the brush. “Kennel four. Haven’t gotten to it today.”
“Perfect.”
I was in the back scrubbing that kennel with more force than necessary, the tile squeaking under the brush, Buddy watching me from the pen across the hall with his head tilted like he was trying to figure out why I was attacking a floor, when the shelter door chimed. I looked up.
He was standing in the entrance with his jacket off, sleeves rolled, a look on his face that said he’d driven here too fast.
“What the hell are you doing here?”
“I told you we were going to talk.”
“And I told you I had an emergency.”
“Your emergency is scrubbing a kennel.”
“It’s a very urgent kennel.”
He took a step toward me and I held up the scrub brush between us like a weapon. “Don’t. I don’t want to hear it right now.”
Mary appeared beside me. She looked him up and down with the expression of a woman who’d already decided his fate, then handed him a pair of rubber gloves and a litter scoop. “If you’re going to stand around in my shelter looking miserable, you might as well make yourself useful. Cat boxes in room three haven’t been done today.”
He took the gloves and the scoop and went to room three without a word. I stared after him because I did not expect the CEO of a major company to accept litter duty without argument. Mary caught my look and shrugged. “What? He’s here. He might as well work.”
Peter came out a few minutes later, on some signal from Mary that I didn’t catch, and he stood beside me, casually draping his arm over my shoulder while we talked about the new intake forms. He had never done that before in the entire time I’d known him. I glanced at Mary, who winked from across the room.
From room three I could hear the sound of litter being scooped with extreme aggression. Every few minutes he appeared in the doorway, looked at Peter’s arm around my shoulder with an expression that cycled through several stages of barely contained murder, and disappeared back inside. Peter dropped the arm eventually because the stare had reached a level of intensity that suggested actual bodily harm was being considered, but the point was made.
I ignored him for two more hours. He scooped litter, refilled water bowls, mopped a floor with the energy of a manchanneling every emotion he had into janitorial work. At one point I walked past room three. He was on his hands and knees scrubbing a stain off the tile, suit pants ruined, hair falling in his face. And I almost felt sorry for him. Almost. Then I remembered the way he looked at me with guilt and kept walking, and the almost disappeared.
I had never seen anyone look so murderous while holding a mop.
When I was finally ready to leave, he was right behind me, sweaty and unkempt with litter dust on his rolled-up sleeves and a smear I didn’t want to identify on his forearm.
“Let me drive you home.”
