"I'm going to call my clients. The ones who've been mine for thirty years. I'm going to tell them I'm closing the practice at the end of the month, and I want them to bring their charts across town to you. I'm going to tell them I'd be grateful if they would."
I didn't have a sentence ready for that.
"Joe. You don't have to do that yet."
"I do."
He let it sit a beat.
"You did right by my Marjorie today. I'm not going to make you keep doing right by my clients with one hand tied behind your back."
He went.
I stood at the front counter a long time after the bell stopped.
I locked the front door at eight-fifteen and walked back through the dark waiting room toward the back office for my coat. The small lamp on the desk was still on from the afternoon.
The crewneck was on the chair.
I crossed the room. I put my hand on the back of the chair. I let it sit there.
I didn't move the crewneck.
I picked up my coat, put it on, turned off the lamp, and closed the door behind me.
It was going to be on the chair in the morning. I still couldn't tell myself what I was waiting for.
I locked the back door and went home.
The first thing I noticed at six-twenty the next morning was that Moose was not under my feet.
The coffee maker was on the counter. The kettle was on the back burner. Moose was supposed to be there because he was at my feet between six-fifteen and six-thirty every morning—that was when I fed him.
I called him. Nothing. I went through the house. His bed was empty. He wasn't at the front door, the bedroom, or the bathroom.
The back door was closed. The deadbolt was across, exactly as I'd left it the night before.
But the back gate was open.
I could see it through the window above the sink. The gate had come away from the latch in the wind. Easton fixed that latch in October, but the wood had moved with the freeze, and the latch had been slack on the bolt for days. I'd been meaning to look at it on a weekend. The weekend never came.
I went out the back door in my robe and slippers.
"Moose."
The yard was empty. The gate stood open. The frost on the grass was marked with paw prints going through the gate, downthe alley between my fence and the Maguires', and up the back trail.
I stood at the open gate and looked at the trail going up into the woods behind the houses on Maple. I'd walked it a hundred times in the autumn with him at my hip, and in October with Easton at my shoulder, the dogs ahead of us in the leaves, and the day at the lake when the heron came up off the water.
The woods were quiet at six-thirty in the morning in December. Quiet in the particular way it's quiet when there's a dog in it that doesn't know the way home.
CHAPTER 23
Easton
Three weeks.
That was the count Shane had been waiting for. I'd told him in this kitchen on a Tuesday morning, the second day I'd been back on shift, to ask me again in a month. He hadn't waited a month.
