Page 62 of Spiced!

Then I heard him stop.

I looked up from my desk because I felt him standing in my doorway.

“Good morning,” I said.

He squinted at me for a moment. “Good morning, Dr. Davis.”

Without another word, he went back to the front desk.

Thirty seconds later, he called down the hallway, “Dr. Davis?”

“Yeah.”

“Was that you humming when I came in?”

“No,” I said.

A pause.

“Okay.” He didn’t sound convinced.

Diane arrived at eight-thirty, dropped her bag by the front desk, and appeared in my doorway with the unerring instinct of a woman who had been reading this particular room for years.

She stared at me. I stared at my chart.

“You look different,” she said.

“I look exactly the same,” I said.

“You look like someone who slept well.”

“I always sleep well.”

“You look like someone who slept well for specific reasons,” she said.

“Diane.”

“Doc.”

“Diane.”

She leaned on the doorframe and continued to stare, and investigator who’d caught a whiff of something and refused to relent. “I’m just making an observation; and, well, Marcus said you were humming.”

“I wasn’t humming.”

“He said it was something with a drum line.”

I nearly choked as I swallowed.

“Marcus misheard,” I said, glancing up. “Room one ready?”

She squinted at me the same way Marcus had earlier. Unlike Marcus, she had the clear-eyed patience of a seasoned interrogator who had time and knew it. “Room one is ready,” she said. “Golden doodle, annual wellness. Very normal.”

The golden doodle was named Biscotti and was, as promised, completely normal and very fluffy and extraordinarily pleased about both of those facts. Her owner, a teacher named Margaret who had been bringing Biscotti to the clinic since she was a puppy, sat in the corner chair and gave me the same update she gave every year. “My baby has a good appetite, good energy, sleeps at the foot of the bed, and still has a vendetta against the neighbor’s sprinkler system.”

Yes, she used that line every single year. Owners were almost as predictable as their pets.

“She barked at it for forty minutes last Tuesday,” Margaret said.