And then we were in the convoy and the vehicle ahead of us was burning.
Reid was still talking. His mouth was moving, but the words were gone, replaced by the sound of metal tearing. I was pulling at a door that wasn’t a door anymore while the heat blistered my hands. Someone was screaming inside the vehicle, and I couldn’t get to them.
Reid was standing in the road behind me saying something I needed to hear, but the fire was eating the sound.
Then everything spun, and I was in front of a window. Reid on the other side of it, sitting on the edge of a bed with his back to me, his shoulders curved forward. I knew what he was about to do.
I was pounding on the glass and shouting his name, and he couldn’t hear me or wouldn’t turn around. My fists hit the window hard enough to split my knuckles, and it didn’t crack, didn’t even vibrate.
He was right there, close enough to touch if the glass weren’t between us…
Then he was gone, and I was at the convoy again. The fire closer. Reid farther away. Back to the room. His shoulders hadn’t moved. I still couldn’t get to him.
The loop tightened every time it cycled, the fire hotter, the room smaller, and my body was locked inside it with no exit.
No way out. I knew what would happen, but there was no way out. No way?—
Weight.
Warm and solid and real, settling across my chest and pressing me into the mattress. Something damp pushed against my neck, and the hallway with Reid dissolved around the edges like wet paper.
Tova’s nose was at my throat. Her chin rested against my collarbone, and her full fifty-five pounds lay distributed across my ribs and sternum, pinning me to the bed, to the cabin, to thehererather than the nightmare. Her body rose and fell with a breathing rhythm so slow and deliberate it was impossible to ignore, which was exactly the point.
The convoy was gone. Reid was gone.
The rest came back in pieces. The ceiling of the cabin. The dark. My own hands fisted in the sheets hard enough that my knuckles burned. My jaw was locked so tight I could feel my pulse in my temples. My heart was hammering against my ribs.
And Tova was lying right on top of it, absorbing every wild beat with her weight.
She didn’t move. She didn’t lift her head or lick my face or make a sound. She just lay there, breathing. The pressure of her body against mine was the only thing in the room that was real, and my lungs found her rhythm before I made a conscious decision to try.
In, slow. Out, slower. The hammering in my chest eased by degrees. My jaw loosened. My fingers released the sheets, one at a time, until my hands were open and flat against the mattress.
I didn’t know how long we stayed like that. Long enough that the sweat cooled on my skin and the dream let go of the last thing it was holding, which was Reid’s face with the light going out behind his eyes.
Tova lifted her head and looked at me. Held my gaze for two full seconds. Then she climbed off the bed, circled once on the floor beside me, and lay back down. She was asleep in thirty seconds, as if what she’d just done was the most ordinary thing in the world.
But what she’d done wasn’t ordinary. She hadn’t panicked. She hadn’t barked or reacted the way a dog reacted when something startled it in the night. She’d climbed onto mychest and positioned herself with specific, deliberate precision: weight across my sternum, nose at my pulse point. She’d held that position until my breathing regulated and my heart rate dropped, and then she’d disengaged.
As if it was what she’d been trained to do.
I scrubbed a hand down my face. Of course it was what she was meant to do. Lark’s voice surfaced from the back of my memory. The open house, two weeks ago, standing beside me at the paddock.
Someone who can’t sleep because the nightmares won’t stop, we train a dog to wake them before the dream peaks. Pressure on the chest, licking the face, whatever breaks through. The dog learns to read the physical signs before the person even knows what’s happening.
I reached for my phone on the nightstand. The screen was too bright in the dark, and I squinted against it while I typed with one thumb:PTSD service dog nightmare response.
The results loaded, and I read until the picture was complete. Deep pressure therapy. The dog was trained to recognize elevated heart rate, rapid breathing, and physical agitation during sleep. Upon detection, the dog would apply firm, even pressure across the handler’s chest and position itself at the neck or face. Once the handler’s vitals stabilized, the dog disengaged.
I set down the phone.
Tova gets anxious during storms.
That’s what Lark had said, that little liar. Standing in the barn with thunder rolling in the distance, her face arranged in the expression of a woman asking a practical favor.Would you mind letting her stay in your cabin tonight? She just needs a warm spot and some company.
The thunderstorm had lasted less than an hour. Tova hadn’t so much as twitched during the entire thing. And she’d been here ever since.
I thought about what Beckett had said at the hardware store:she’ll say she needs help and then do it all herself before you get your boots on.
