“She’s trouble. The breeder made that very clear.”
“Not the puppy, love. Celeste. She’s perfect for you.”
Right on cue, Celeste appears in the kitchen doorway. She’s dressed, hair pulled back, cheeks still flushed from the guesthouse. She takes one look at Mum holding a puppy and her whole face opens up. Her heavy thoughts go airy for a momentat the sight of something so sweet. For a flash, there’s pure, uncomplicated delight in her eyes.
“Oh my gosh,” Celeste breathes. “Saylor.”
“Surprise.”
“That’s a puppy.”
“Excellent observation. Your fashion eye extends to zoology.”
She crosses the kitchen and stands beside Mum, reaching out to scratch behind the puppy’s ears. The dog responds by attempting to climb from Ada’s arms onto Celeste’s head, which requires an intervention from both of us and results in a three-person, one-dog pile-up that dissolves into laughter.
For twenty minutes, the kitchen is chaos in the best way. The puppy explores every corner with frantic energy, sniffing cabinet doors and skidding on the hardwood and attempting to befriend the table leg. Mum watches from her chair with the kind of focused joy I haven’t seen on her face since Wollongong. Celeste sits on the floor, cross-legged, letting the puppy climb over her lap, and every time the dog licks her hand she makes a sound that is completely at odds with her professional reputation.
“She needs a name,” Ada says.
“Not yet,” I say. “Let her tell us. Heelers are opinionated. She’ll let us know who she is.”
“Spoken like a true dog dad,” Celeste says.
“Dog brother. She’s Mum’s.”
“I think she belongs to all of us,” Mum says quietly, and the words land heavier than she intended, because “all of us” means something different now than it did a week ago. All of us means a family. Fractured and improbable and held together with marker-ink promises and borrowed trucks and a love that nobody planned for, but a family nonetheless.
The puppy falls asleep in Mum’s lap. Just drops mid-exploration, the way puppies do, from full speed to unconscious in the space of a breath. Mum strokes her ears with fingers thatare steadier than they’ve been in months, and the kitchen goes quiet, and the morning fills the room with the kind of light that makes everything look possible.
I’m watching Celeste watch Mum when I notice the shift.
It’s small. After a smallding, Celeste pulls her phone out of her pocket. The screen is lit up with a notification. She reads, her face contorting just a beat before she recomposes herself. The warmth in the room drains by a degree. Her jaw sets, just slightly. Her thumb hovers over the screen as if she’s reading the message twice to make sure she understood it correctly.
“Everything okay?” I ask.
She looks up. The smile she gives me is real, but it’s braced. Reinforced at the corners, the way you shore up a wall you know is about to take weight.
“Everything’s fine.” She slips the phone into her back pocket. Then she stands, brushes off her jeans, and bends to kiss the puppy on the head. She kisses Mum on the cheek and congratulates her on the new puppy. She crosses to me and holds my face in both hands and kisses me on the mouth, quick but firm, right in front of my mother, in the morning light, with no hesitation at all.
“Enjoy the puppy,” she says. “Both of you. I have something I need to take care of.”
“Now?”
“It can’t wait.” She’s already reaching for her keys on the counter. Her bag is by the door. “I’ll be back. I just need to handle something.”
“Celeste.”
She stops at the doorway. Turns back. Her eyes meet mine and I search them for a clue, for the content of that text, for whatever just pulled her out of the best morning we’ve had in weeks. But Celeste Brinley has spent twenty years learning tokeep her face still when the ground moves beneath her. She gives me nothing.
“Trust me,” she says. “I’ll explain when I get back.”
She’s gone before I can answer. The front door closes. A moment later, her car starts in the driveway. The engine fades down the road and the house goes quiet except for the puppy snoring in Mum’s lap and the kettle clicking as it cools.
Mum looks at me. “That wasn’t nothing.”
“No,” I agree. “It wasn’t.”
The puppy sighs in her sleep. Mum’s hand rests on the small gray body, protective and steady. I stand at the kitchen window and watch the empty driveway and tell myself that Celeste said ‘trust me,’ and that trusting her is the one thing I’ve learned to do this summer that doesn’t scare me anymore.
