Chapter nineteen
George
Ifind the note before I've even set down my coffee.
It's torn from the corner of a legal pad, her handwriting slanted and fast, like she was already moving when she wrote it.
Baxter slipped his leash. The dog walker thinks he might be at the dog park. I'm going to find him. – Tessa
I press my phone button four times to no effect. It's been dead for at least half an hour. I thought I could manage without it for an afternoon. I guess I thought wrong.
I grab my coat before I head out the door.
Three blocks. I cover them at something close to a jog, which I tell myself is not panic, just the fastest way to get there.
I spot Tessa first.
She's sitting cross-legged in the grass near the far fence, completely still, like she has nowhere else in the world to be. Then I see Baxter, and I stop walking entirely. He is sprawled across her lap with his chin on her knee and his eyes half-closed, exactly the way he sleeps at the foot of my bed on nights when he thinks I won't notice.
Baxter does not do this with people he's known for less than a year. He barely did it with me until month three. Something tightens in my chest that I don't immediately have a name for.
The dog walker materializes at my elbow, breathless and apologetic, her braid coming loose from its tie. "Mr. Maddox, I'm so sorry. He slipped the clip somehow, I don't know how he — "
I put my hand up to stop her because she looks genuinely worried and I don't have the heart for it right now.
"He's fine," I say, and I mean it, because he clearly, demonstrably is. Seventy feet away, my dog is in a state of profound spiritual contentment.
She tells me in a rush that she called my phone four times before trying my emergency contact. I blink. "My emergency contact is my sister."
"Yes," she says. "Your sister was going to try to get ahold of you."
Eleanor must have called Tessa.
I look across the grass at Tessa, who is now scratching behind Baxter's ear and saying something to him I can't hear. Whatever her afternoon held, she dropped it. She just came.
The dog walker finishes apologizing, I finish reassuring her, and then she leaves and it's just the three of us.
My shoes are getting damp from the grass as I walk toward them. Baxter lifts his head, clocks me, and immediately puts his head back down on Tessa's knee with a sigh of deep, theatrical contentment.
"Traitor," I say, mostly to the dog.
Tessa tips her head back to look up at me, squinting against the afternoon light. There's a small smile on her face that she doesn't seem to be managing. "He was very distressed," she says. "We both were."
I lower myself onto the grass beside her because standing over her feels wrong, and suddenly we're closer than I planned, closeenough that I can smell something faintly floral. It could be her shampoo, or just the warmth of her in the open air. Baxter shifts between us like a small, self-satisfied mediator.
"You came after him," I say, because I need to say it out loud.
She shrugs with one shoulder, the way she does when something seems obvious to her. "Someone had to keep him out of trouble."
She means the dog. I hear it differently.
I watch her fingers move through Baxter's fur with slow, absentminded strokes. "You didn't have to," I tell her.
She turns and looks at me directly. Her eyes are very steady. "Of course I did."
The certainty in it lands somewhere behind my sternum and stays there.
Baxter rearranges himself so he's leaning against her side, which means he's leaning slightly against mine too, which means the space between us has become very small, and technically, the dog is responsible for all of it. "He likes you," I say, which is accurate and almost entirely beside the point.I like yousits just behind my teeth, not quite ready.
