“In most ways. He’s loud and chaotic and he talks constantly. He has no concept of personal space or quiet hours or the appropriate number of sparkle emojis to draw on a Post-it note. But he’s also . . .” I stopped, because the sentence I’d been building required a word I wasn’t sure I wanted to say out loud in Ayesha’s office on a Tuesday afternoon. “He’s perceptive. He pays attention in ways that don’t match the rest of him. He noticed that Hiro eats better from a hand than a bowl, and he figured that out by watching me with Shortcake, and he didn’t make a thing of it. He just did it.”
“That sounds like someone who cares.”
“He cares abouteverything. That’s the problem. He cares loudly and indiscriminately and with his entire being. Living with that is like living next to a bonfire. Even when you’re not looking at it directly, you can feel the heat.”
Ayesha’s eyes narrowed as she unfolded her hands, picked up her fork, speared a piece of lettuce, and said, “You should do the event.”
“Because it’s good for the clinic.”
“Because it’s good for the clinic,” she agreed. “And because you haven’t talked about anything with this much energy since you started here. I include your surgical outcomes in that assessment.”
“That’s not true.”
“You described a kitten’s bathroom escape with more narrative detail than you’ve ever given a case presentation. I stand by my assessment.”
I left Ayesha’s office and went back to the surgical suite, where a cat was waiting for a dental extraction. The work was clean and logical and did not require me to think about bonfires or Post-it notes or the way Benji Kwon paid attention to things when he thought no one was watching.
On Saturday, I went to Barbacks.
I didn’t go there for a drink, and I most definitely didn’t go there because Benji had forgotten his phone again. This was an assessment visit, the walk-through I’d insisted on before agreeing to anything, and I approached it with the same methodical focus I brought to pre-surgical evaluations.
I had a checklist on my phone.
I had questions about ventilation, noise levels, floor surfaces, exit routes, and the proximity of the animal area to the bar and kitchen.
I was going to evaluate this space objectively and make a decision based on evidence. The fact that Benji had offered to meet me there an hourbefore opening so we could walk through it without the crowd was a logistical convenience and nothing more.
He was waiting outside when I pulled up, sitting on the curb. Two coffees steamed beside him. He was scrolling through something with the absent focus of a person killing time. The moment he saw me, he rose and held out one of the coffees.
“Black, right?”
“How did you know that?”
“Peter, you drink black coffee every morning three feet away from me. This is not detective work.”
I took the coffee. It was good. He’d gone to a place that wasn’t the chain on the corner, which meant he’d driven somewhere specifically to get coffee he thought I’d like.
I accepted that piece of information without comment.
He walked me through the bar with a thoroughness that, again, surprised me. He’d measured the space near the back, calculated the square footage available for crates and pens, and identified the ventilation points and the nearest exits. He showed me how the kitchen could be sealed and walked me through the traffic flow he’d mapped out, which kept the animal area separated from the main bar by a buffer zone wide enough to manage noise and foottraffic.
“The music will stay low during the event,” he said. “Background level, maybe lower. Finn and Mark already agreed. We can cap attendance if it gets too crowded, because the animals come first.”
“You’re quoting my own words back to me.”
“They were good words. I borrowed them. Liberated them, actually. They were being oppressed.”
I refused to laugh, though my stupid lip curled at one corner. A bit. Only a fucking bit.
Benji grinned but said nothing.
We walked the space one more time, checking sightlines and surfaces and the things that only mattered if you’d spent years watching animals react to environments that humans designed without thinking about them.
The floor was hardwood, which was easy to clean.
The lighting was warm but not harsh.
The back area was partially enclosed, which would give nervous animals a sense of containment without making them feel trapped.
