Audrey set her arm along the back of my chair.
Easton put his hand on my knee under my coat and left it there.
I looked at the place where Caldwell had been standing.
He'd lost the vote. He hadn't lost the war.
I'd seen it in the extra second his hand stayed on mine.
CHAPTER 15
Astrid
Ten days after the council vote, I unlocked the front door of Hartsdale Veterinary at seven-fifty in the morning and stood inside it for a beat without turning on the lights.
The sign over the door was new. I watched the man from the print shop screw it into the brick on Friday afternoon, and I stood on the sidewalk in my coat with my hands in my pockets and looked up at it long enough that he asked me twice if it was straight. It was straight. I just wanted to keep looking at it.
The sign readHartsdale Veterinaryin dark green letters on a cream ground. My name was in smaller letters underneath:Astrid Matthews, DVM. I called the printer back twice about the comma.
Inside, the waiting room smelled like fresh paint that hadn't fully cured and the lemon polish I put on the front counter the night before. The chairs were from a consignment place two towns over, four of them, mismatched in the right way. The coffee maker on the side counter was my mother's, dug out of a box in the garage in September and driven across the river on the passenger seat of my car.
Moose was already in his bed in the corner. He walked into the waiting room like a man on his first day at a new job,surveyed the chairs, and lowered himself onto the bed I put there the week before.
The cat moved himself in over the weekend. I brought him on Saturday to see how he'd do. He walked out of the carrier, strutted the perimeter of the back room, jumped onto the filing cabinet, and lay down. By Sunday morning, he was still on it. I took the hint.
I turned on the lights and started the coffee. I put my stethoscope around my neck because that was the part of getting dressed that always made me feel like I was at work.
The clock above the door said eight.
The bell over the door went off two seconds later.
Audrey came through it in scrubs, lipstick, and a sash.
The sash was bachelorette-party pink satin. She drew GRAND OPENING on it in black Sharpie. The lettering went uphill on the second word. Sunflowers in one hand, the white bakery bag from the place on Main in the other, and on her face, the full makeup a woman does at six in the morning when she has not yet been to bed.
"Audrey."
"Don't start."
"I wasn't."
"You had a face."
"I'm smiling."
"That's the face."
She set the bakery bag on the front counter, unwrapped the bread, and cut the first slice with a steak knife she pulled out of her purse—a knife she had no business carrying in a purse, and which she did not explain. She set the slice on a paper plate she'd also brought and slid it to the corner of the counter.
"For the first client."
"What if the first client is allergic to cinnamon?"
"The first client will not be allergic to cinnamon. Stop."
She'd brought a vase, too, of course. Filled it at the sink in the back and put the sunflowers in. Turned around with her hands on her hips.
"It's beautiful."
