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Corinne comes downstairs at ten with her tablet.

“No refunds,” she says. “No credits. And they’ve both added services.” She looks at the screen, and then at me, like she’s seeing me for the first time. “Two extra hours on the Arches. Premium bar service for both parties. Six bottles of the Hallendt mead.” She shakes her head slowly. “We were going to lose both bookings. I was going to have to refund one of them in full.”

“Well,” I say. “We didn’t.”

She looks at me for another second. Then she laughs, a little helplessly. “No,” she says. “We didn’t. Desmond would have loved this.”

At ten-thirty, I hand the Arches bar over to Theo and go up to the loading dock for air.

It’s the first time I’ve stopped moving in five hours. My feet hurt. My shirt is stuck to my back. There’s a feather in my braid. The dock is quiet and dark, and the air smells like rain and diesel and the steel door clangs shut behind me.

Tav is sitting on a bench at the edge of the dock, a heavy steel thing bolted to the concrete. He’s drinking a bottle of water, and the bench is the only thing I’ve seen all night that looks the right size for him.

He moves over. I sit down next to him.

For a while, neither of us says anything.

“You did good,” he says.

“We did good.”

“No.” He turns the water bottle in his huge hands. “I knew the rooms. Anybody could know the rooms. You talked to the bride.” He looks at me. “Everybody was yelling about who booked first. You didn’t care who booked first. You figured out what each of them needed and gave it to them. The trolls needed the floor. The harpies needed the sky.” He shrugs. “And when the mother started with the talons, you didn’t look at them once.”

“Thanks,” I say. My voice comes out rougher than I mean it to.

“You belong here, Boss,” Tav says, simply, and drinks his water.

I look out at the lot. My car is still parked behind the delivery van. Neither of us mentions it.

“How’s the dog?” he asks.

So I get out my phone.

I have three hundred pictures of Billy Bob. I show him Billy Bob asleep upside down on Merek’s couch with all four legs in the air. Billy Bob with one ear inside out. Billy Bob climbing his ramp with tremendous dignity. Billy Bob staring into the camera with the expression of a dog who has been personally betrayed by a bath.

Tav takes each one seriously. He holds the phone in his enormous palm and looks at every picture for a long time.

“He’s moving better,” he says, at the ramp photo. “His back legs. Better than in the kitchen.”

“You noticed that?”

“He was favoring the left one on Monday.” He hands me the phone. “Is the ramp still broken? The hinge?”

“Merek’s looking at it.”

Tav nods. “So he ate a corncob,” he says.

“Yeah,” I agree. “Six thousand dollars of corncob. It’s why I was in the car.”

He doesn’t say anything to that. He doesn’t look sorry for me either. He just sits beside me on the steel bench, very big and very warm, and after a while he says, “Most people wouldn’t. For a dog.”

“He’s my dog.”

“I know,” he says. “That’s what I mean.”

We sit for a minute. Down on the street, someone’s car alarm goes off and stops.

“That troll wedding,” he says. “That’s two hundred and twelve.”