Page 141 of Slashed Bonds

While she was out.

I file that too. There’s a line there, and Cash stepped over it, and I’d have stepped over it with him, and that doesn’t make it not a line.

Knox huffs and wanders off, nose to the ground, on a sniffing circuit of the bench and the brick and the base of the nearest pine. I don’t worry about it. He’s not going anywhere. He’s never once gone anywhere that didn’t have her at the other end.

He comes back a minute later with a stick. Not his. A real one, a branch off the pine, two feet long and still green, and he lays it across my boots and sits down and looks at me.

I look at the stick.

“He wants you to throw it,” Nikolai says.

“I know what he wants.”

I don’t throw it. I pick it up, and I hold it, and the dog watches me hold it with his head tilted, and after a while he decides that’s acceptable and lies down across my feet with his chin on the branch.

He gave me something. I’m aware of what that costs, from an animal that’s spent five years giving nothing to anyone but her.

The twins said he ate a hockey toy whole on Saturday. The whole thing, the stuffed kind, and then slept for six hours and woke up untroubled and did it again Sunday. I’ve started to think the destruction is a love language. The things he takes apart are the things he’s decided belong to the house.

He took my skate guard. I’m choosing to read that as a report too.

“Are they?” I ask. “Right for her?”

Nikolai doesn’t answer right away.

He’s looking at my cigarette. I hold it out. He crosses to the bench and sits down beside me, our shoulders touching, and takes it, and pulls on it like a man who hasn’t smoked in a month and has been thinking about it for twenty-nine days.

He smells like her.

Not entirely. Juniper, mint, the cold under it, that’s his. But over it, soaked in from a night of her face in his neck, black cherry, plum, the winter thread, so that for a second with his shoulder against mine I can’t tell where his scent stops.

That’s going to be the whole house in a month. Her, on all of us. And none of us is going to say a word about it.

I’m not going to claim the nicotine makes anything easier. It doesn’t. But it sits on the thing in me that wants to spiral, the thing that would dearly like to go find a gas-station phone in Halbrook and the hand holding it, and it keeps that thing in its chair.

“If you want my honest opinion…”

“Which I do.”

He takes another pull. Lets it out toward the dead building across the road.

“I don’t think they are. I think they’re making her recovery worse.”

I frown.

Turn my head. He turns his. We look at each other in the dark with the cigarette between us, and I can see him trying to hide it, and I can read him better than anyone alive.

He’s angry.

Not the loud kind. The kind Nikolai gets when something’s been done to a thing he’s decided is his, and it’s been done quietly, over years, by people with credentials.

It’s never good when Nikolai gets angry. It’s worse when he gets quiet about it.

“What can we do to fix it?”

Straight to the point. There’s no use worrying about the past. The past I can handle. I can dig, and I will, and I’ll find out who signed off on a medication plan that kept a woman upright for five years at the cost of keeping her from getting better, and I’ll ruin them and everyone who shares their surname.

Later. That’s a later job. Tonight’s a now job.