“How is he?”
“Settling. I think he’s okay.”
Peter’s visible eye moved to Hiro, who was now breathing evenly against my leg with his nose tucked against my knee.
“Thanks,” Peter murmured.
“Go back to sleep.”
His eye closed.
Within a minute, his breathing matched Hiro’s, slow and even and deep, and I sat on the floor of Peter Loupier’s bedroom at 3 a.m. with a dog against my leg and the sound of two sleeping creatures fillingthe dark around me.
I should have gone to the foster room.
There was no reason to stay.
But the floor was warm and the room was quiet and Hiro’s heartbeat was steady under my hand.
I told myself I’d stay for just a few more minutes, just until I was sure the pain had fully passed.
I was still there when the sun came up.
Chapter 8
Peter
The best part of my day was always the drive to work, but not for the reason one might think.
It wasn’t that I was eager to leave my apartment; though I must admit that the addition of a hairless cat and a man who narrated his morning routine like a sportscaster calling a game had made the drive feel slightly more like an escape than it used to.
The drive was good because it was seventeen minutes of blessed quiet on roads that Tampa residents hadn’t managed to clog, and because the clinic sat on a stretch of Bayshore that caught the morning light off the water in a way that made the whole building look like it was glowing. It was also because every time I pulled into the parking lot, something in my chest settled into a harmony that the rest of my life couldn’t seem to find.
I was good at my job.
I don’t say that to boast, and I wouldn’t say it tomost people. Modesty is a habit my mother instilled in me alongside a fear of God and a suspicion of anyone who talked too much.
But it was true.
I was a good veterinary surgeon.
I’d been a good one for eight years.
The operating room was one place in my life where every piece of me worked the way it was supposed to. My hands were steady, my focus was absolute, and the noise in my head went quiet when I was working, because there wasn’t room for it. There was only the animal on the table and the problem in front of me and the clean, precise logic of fixing what was broken.
Tampa Bay Veterinary Specialists was a mid-sized practice wedged between a CrossFit gym and a boba tea shop in a strip mall that had no business housing a surgical suite but somehow did. The waiting room smelled like antiseptic, dog treats, and the particular brand of anxiety that pet owners exude when they’re trying to be brave.
Our staff was small and competent.
Dr. Ayesha Kaur handled oncology and internal medicine with a calm authority that could make a panicking owner believe everything would be fine simply by the way she adjusted her stethoscope. Carlos, the senior vet tech, had hands almost as steadyas mine and a talent for keeping animals calm that bordered on supernatural. And Debbie at the front desk had been running veterinary offices since before I was born. She managed the schedule, the billing, the pharmaceutical inventory, and the emotional well-being of every human who walked through the door with a competence that made the rest of us look like amateurs.
“Morning, Dr. Loupier,” Debbie said when I walked in at 7:45. She didn’t look up from her computer. She never looked up when she greeted people, because looking up would cost her three seconds of productivity, and Debbie did not waste seconds. “Your eight o’clock is in Room Two. Labrador. Ate a sock.”
“A whole sock?”
“Men’s athletic, crew length. The owner brought the matching one for reference.” She held up a Ziploc bag containing a single white sock. “I told him we don’t usually need a visual aid, but he was very insistent.”
“Appreciate the thoroughness.”
