“Hello? What did you say?” I shout into the phone over the window-rattling cracks of lightning. “Caleb?”
My phone beeps. The call is over.
No cell service.
chapter sixteen
Caleb
Shit. She hung up on me? Did I really take it too far? I stare at the phone screen. K9 Rex stares up at me with one look on his face that clearly means:Are you gonna feed me or just stare at that device in your hand?
“Sorry, bud,” I say, kneeling down and filling his food bowl. It’s pouring rain outside and my boots have tracked water all over the indoor room of the kennel. I set his bowl down in front of him, then instinctively move to Rain’s kennel, but it’s not her kennel anymore. She’s upstairs in the main house, probably asleep on Max’s bed. If only all retired working dogs were as easy to adopt out as Rain had been.
I grab a rag and wipe up the water off the floor while Rex scarfs down his food. “That’s exactly why you don’t get much food at one time,” I tell him. “We gotta keep that stomach safe.”
With everything good here, I tell Rex goodnight, flip off the overhead light, and brace myself to run through the rain back to the main house. Maybe one day, with enough donations, I can build a covered walkway between all the buildings.
Once inside, I head past my brothers playing PS5 in the living room, steal a chicken wing from Ethan in the kitchen, and then go upstairs to sulk in peace. Ranger is already asleep in his crate in my room. I keep the crate door open but he loves being in there, especially in the rain.
I may have a ton of stuff going on, and a torrential downpour is happening outside, but I can’t believe she hung up on me. Charlotte rarely ever calls, and it’s always about business. The gala, the vendors, all the things. Of course it’s about business—she’s a professional businesswoman who isn't looking for a boyfriend. But damned if it doesn’t make my heart flutter every time I see her name light up my phone.
The SOS symbol appears in the top right corner of the screen. We’ve lost service, which happens a lot during bad weather. When I was a cop, I had priority cell service that worked anywhere, any time. But I’m not a first responder anymore so that privilege is gone. I can’t call her back, even if I wanted to. Not sure what I’d say…Sorry? What did I do to warrant getting hung up on?
This will bother me all night. Maybe I should text her.
Or maybe not because it’s late and she’s my professional event planner, not my friend.
“We’re friends.”
She’d said it herself, though.
Dammit that whole conversation was weird. It felt like there was way more to be said and then it just ended. A tap on my door alerts me to Ethan walking in. He sits at the “work from home” desk I set up a few months ago when I realized I’m often working at all hours of the night and it gets cold in the admin building, and sometimes I just want to stay in my sweatpants and work right next to my bed.
“I’ve got news I’ve been meaning to tell you,” he says.
I set my phone down. “Good or bad?”
“It’s good, but you might be…” He wavers his hand. “Annoyed at first.”
I sit straighter, already pre-annoyed for whatever he’s got to say. “What on earth does that mean?”
He rests his forearms on the chair arms. “This is a nice chair. We should get these in the office.”
“Are you stalling or just easily distracted?” I ask my big brother. He’s only older by two years, but he’s always felt like a wise old man, even when we were kids. At six years old, he carried my four year old self all the way across the property to the main house when my ankle was broken from jumping out of the oak tree after he told me not to. Sometimes it feels like he still carries us all, not physically, but by doing the mental work the rest of us don’t think about doing.
“A Houston news station reached out to us,” he says, still admiring the feel of the chair by squishing himself into it and swiveling it around. “So, not like tiny small town news, but one of the big ones.”
“Okay?” We’re three hours outside of Houston, way out in the middle of nowhere, Texas. “What do they want?”
“They want to send a journalist out to learn about Alden Brothers K9.” Thunder booms and the lights go out. A few seconds later, the generator kicks in, turning everything back on. Ethan frowns at the window like the bad weather has purposely offended him. “Anyway, they’re actually more interested in the nonprofit part. They want to send a journalist out to tour the place, talk to you about it and stuff, and they said they might feature it on the nightly news, but at the very least they’ll do a writeup online about it.”
“Dude, that’s awesome. Why would I be annoyed about that? We need all the press coverage we can get so we can help more retired working dogs.”
“Because they want to do it on camera.”
“Oh.” My lip curls. Then I shrug, remembering how fun it had been to talk to Charlotte’s camera. That was probably because of the beautiful woman standing behind it. Professional news crews have the big TV camera that would be a million times more imposing to talk into. “I mean, I can do it. I should probably get used to stuff like that if I’m going to make this nonprofit succeed.”
“For sure, man. You’ll do fine. Just don’t do that nervous eye rub thing you do.”
