Page 149 of Spiced!

“She’s completely okay. The trigger cleared within the observation window. There have been no episodes in nearly three months. She’s back to full behavior.”

“You said it was mold,” Adrian said.

“The working theory was mold. The confirmed cause was chemical off-gassing from the new ductwork insulation as it cured. There was a small amount of mold, but it turned out to be a red herring. The compounds coming off the insulation were the real trigger.” I heard myself and stopped. “Sorry. You didn’t ask for the whole scientific gobbledygook.”

“I always want the full workup,” Adrian said, and meant it, the way he always meant it.

I didn’t reply.

I couldn’t quite, at that particular moment, with the particular thing I was carrying.

I looked at the path instead and kept walking and hoped he’d read it as the ordinary quiet and not the other kind.

He didn’t seem to notice.

That was good.

I needed a few more minutes of him not noticing.

Marisol was at the fence when we came around the last bend.

She stood near the viewing rail, unhurried and healthy in a way that showed in how she moved. She looked loose and easy, with none of the careful avoidance that had defined every piece of footage I’d studied for two months. When she saw us, she made a low sound through her nose and came the rest of the way to the fence.

“Hi,” Adrian said quietly, leaning on the rail. “Look at you. You’re all better.”

She investigated his fingers through the gap, slow and deliberate, and then huffed and pressed the flat of her snout briefly against the rail near his hand. This was as close to affection as a Malayan tapir came, and which Dr. Reyes had told me privately she did for almost no one.

Adrian made a small sound.

“She likes you,” I said.

“She remembers me.”

“She might,” I said. “Dr. Reyes says she does that for maybe three people.”

“I asked about her for months,” Adrian said, watching her, his whole face open the way it went open when something reached him. “I told you she’d know.”

She stayed at the fence with us, occasionally investigating, mostly just present, the way animals were present when they felt safe.

The morning was warm and quiet.

The zoo hummed faintly with its early machinery, keepers somewhere out of sight, the day not yet started.

My heart was doing something I would have found clinically interesting in a patient.

“Adrian.”

“Yeah.” He didn’t look away from Marisol.

“I want to tell you something, and I need you to look at me for it.”

He turned, a question scrawled on his brow.

Something in my face must have told him, because his own face began, very slowly, to change. It was the dawning of a man who read rooms for a living arriving at the meaning of this particular room about two seconds before I got the words out.

“Brendan?” he said.

“I’m not good at saying things loudly. You know that about me. I do things quietly, and I do them once, and I mean them all the way down.” I made myself keep his eyes. “I’ve spent every day we’ve been together telling you smaller truths, because the large ones were too big to get out of my mouth. The first time I saw you, you were dancing on a bar, and I couldn’t look away. I told myself it was the choreography. Then you carried a beagle into my clinic, and I told myself it was professional interest. Both times I was lying. I knew I was lying. I did it anyway, because the truth was the size of the rest of my life, and I wasn’t ready to hold something that big.”