"So," she said over her shoulder.
"Hit me."
"Duke's pinball machine."
"Yeah."
"Still in his basement?"
"Yup. Still in his basement."
"Still not flipping?"
"Right side won't lift."
She made a small, mock-sympathetic sound, somewhere between a hum and a sigh. "That's a tragedy."
"A man should be allowed to flip both sides." I watched her glance over her shoulder, the corner of her mouth already tilting. "It's the principle."
"It's the principle," she echoed, dead serious, and held it for a beat before the corner of her mouth gave it up.
"Do you have something against pinball, Matthews?"
"Not at all. I love pinball." She paused on the trail, turned half toward me, hands in her fleece pockets. "I just like watching firefighters work very hard to fix a thing that hasn't worked since 1981."
"It's a craft."
"You sound like Duke."
"That's the worst thing you've ever said to me."
She laughed—the real kind, from her chest. Moose came galloping back at the sound of it and circled her knees once before peeling off again.
She was easier in her body this morning than she'd been at any point since she came home. Her shoulders sat lower. Her hands weren't shaking. I noticed because I'd spent twelve years on a firehouse line being trained to notice things—the angle of smoke, the pattern of soot above a doorframe—and at some point, I'd stopped being able to turn it off around her. Three weeks ago, she opened her door for me with her shoulders up around her ears and a smile that didn't fit her face. Three weeksago, she let me put my hand over hers at her kitchen table and didn't move it.
I figured I'd allow myself the three paces and try not to think too hard about why I was counting them.
We were maybe two hundred yards from the lake when we heard it.
The first sound was a kid. Loud enough to come through the trees. The second sound was a mother when something had just gone wrong.
I was looking at Astrid when it happened. Her head came up before mine did. Her boots were moving on the trail before I'd done the math on what we were hearing.
"Astrid."
She didn't stop.
She was off the trail in the next breath, cutting straight downhill through the brush toward the water. Moose came back at the sound of her voice and overshot her, plowing through the undergrowth with his ears flat.
Penny was already lunging at my hip.
I caught her by the collar before her front feet cleared the lip of the bank. She was twelve years old. Three weeks out of anesthesia. The slope ahead of us needed a young dog with intact hips, and she had neither. She tried again, her front legs out over the edge, her back legs unable to catch the angle, and her weight tipped forward in a way that turned my stomach over. I had a hand under her chest, and another at her collar, and I hauled her back onto level ground before gravity finished the job.
"Pen. No. Stay."
She was trying to go, straining toward Astrid, soundless, the whole of her wanting to follow. I got her behind the nearest maple, looped her lead twice around the trunk, and double-knotted on the second wrap.
"Stay."
