He thumps his tail once and doesn't open his eyes.
The fire pops. The katydids are going in the pines, and the heat of the day is finally breaking into something I can breathe, and I sit there with my wine, trying to mellow out.
It doesn't work tonight. The folder's too close.
Screenshots. Messages. They look like they came from you.
I keep turning it over, looking for the loose thread, and there isn't one, because you can't pull a thread out of a thing that was sewn shut by somebody who wanted you to drown.
All of the attachments have been created to be used against me. I know that. Karen knows it too, but how in the heck am I going to prove that?
Hoagie's head comes up.
"What?" I say.
He's looking at the gap in the fence, the one my father keeps meaning to fix, the one where the boards have pulled apart just wide enough.
"Hoagie. No."
He's gone before the word's all the way out, seventy pounds of him squeezing through a gap that should not fit him, and then his tags are jingling away into the dark on the other side, toward the rental that's had its lights on all week.
"Hoagie." I'm up and out of the chair, wine abandoned in the grass. "Hoagie, come.Come!"
Nothing. Of course nothing. He has never once come when called in eight years and he's not going to start tonight, when I look like I've been crying and I'm in my pajamas that aren’t appropriate for company.
I go through the gate because I'm too tired to fold myself through the gap, and come around the tree line calling his name in the loud whisper you use when you don't want the whole road to hear you, and I stop.
Because he's found the neighbor.
There's a porch on the back of the rental, and a single light burning low above the door, and under it my dog is sitting at the feet of the biggest man I have ever seen up close, like he's been doing it his whole life.
The man is sitting very still in a wooden chair. He's got a hand down, resting on Hoagie's head, not scratching, justresting it there, and Hoagie has his eyes half closed and his whole traitorous body leaned into the man's leg.
I see the bike first, really see it, parked off to the side of the drive where the silhouette came from the night I watched the window for too long.
Black and heavy. Serious in a way the trucks outside the church aren't.
And I see the man, and everything my mother ever taught me about men like this stands up at once in the back of my mind and starts talking.
"He's friendly," I say, which is the wrong first thing, but it's the thing that comes out. "I'm so sorry. He does this. He goes through the fence."
The man looks at me. He doesn't get up fast, doesn't apologize over me, doesn't fill the air.
He just looks, and there's nothing in it that makes me want to step back, which surprises me, because most things this week have made me want to step back.
"He's all right." His voice is low and even. "He's been keeping me company."
"He has a real talent for finding the one person who didn't invite him."
The corner of the man's mouth moves. Not a smile, yet.
He stands, and it's a whole event, the standing—he just keeps going up—and Hoagie scrambles to his feet beside him, delighted, like the two of them have plans now.
The man bends and hooks two fingers under Hoagie's collar, gentle, and walks him to the edge of the porch toward me, and I get a look at his hands in the porch light.
They're scarred. The knuckles especially, white lines over them, the kind of marks you don't get from anything good. One of them's been broken before and healed a little crooked.
I notice them and then I notice I've noticed them, and I make myself look back up at his face.
