Page 124 of Spiced!

“She knows,” Adrian said with complete confidence. He then reached down to let Marisol investigate his fingers through the fence gap, which she did, slow and deliberate, taking her time with the decision.

I stood there for a second and watched the two of them, a tapir who’d spent months silently managing a medical problem nobody could see and a man who had asked, from the very beginning, whether she was scared instead of what was wrong with her. He’d understood instinctively that those were two different questions and only one of them actually mattered to Marisol. Then I thought about a corner of an enclosure on a screen in my office, watched late at night, and how far that screen was from this, from actually being here.

“Thank you,” I said to Dr. Reyes.

“I should be thanking you,” she said. “You stayed on this when most consults would have moved on after the bloodwork came back inconclusive the first time.”

“She kept telling me something was wrong,” I said. “I just had to listen.”

Marisol huffed again and wandered back toward the water, satisfied, leaving Adrian still smiling at the fence post where her nose had been.

We stopped by the gift shop on the way out because Adrian insisted. He bought a small stuffed tapir from the rack without telling me, paying while I was looking at the otter postcards. He didn’t reveal it until we were in the car.

“For Diane,” he said, handing it over. “I figure her desk needs a second one, for solidarity, you know?”

“She has a stuffed tapir already.”

“Then this one can be her backup. Tapirs travel in pairs sometimes, don’t they? I read that somewhere.”

“You didn’t read that somewhere.”

“I read it just now, in my head, as a fact I decided was true.”

I chuckled, shook my head, and took his hand in mine. He immediately entwined our fingers and began stroking with his thumb.

I drove us home with the small stuffed tapir riding in the cupholder between us. Somewhere on the Veterans Expressway, my phone chimed with a text from Marcus.

Marcus: Mark wants the anniversary headcount by Monday. He says, “tell Brendan to ask Adrian since Adrian actually knows things.” His exact words.

I showed Adrian the screen.

“That’s very Mark,” Adrian said.

“Is it?”

“He doesn’t ask for things directly if he can route them through someone else first. It saves him a conversation, and he’s efficient if he’s anything.” Adrian was already typing something into his own phone, a note or a list. I couldn’t be sure. “He also doesn’t trust numbers he didn’t generate himself, so whatever I give him, he’ll probably run it through his own formula anyway.”

“Why ask for it then?”

“It’s his process,” Adrian said. “He likes having the raw data even if he doesn’t end up using it. Don’t take it personally if he questions it.”

“I wasn’t going to take it personally. I don’t know him well enough to take anything personally.”

“You will,” Adrian said, looking up from his phone. “Give it time. He warms up. It just looks like a spreadsheet at first.”

I typed back to Marcus that we’d have the headcount Sunday, which Marcus answered a moment later with a single word: Bold.

“What’s bold about Sunday?” I asked.

“Mark’s deadlines are aspirational,” Adrian said. “He sets a date and then revises it down. If we actually hit Sunday, it’ll throw him.”

“Sounds like you know him pretty well.”

“All those Fridays and Saturdays will do that, I guess,” Adrian said, and went back to his list.

Puck met us at the door the way Puck always met us, fast, loud, and immediately suspicious of anything new. Within four minutes, he’d located the stuffed tapir, removed it from the counter where Adrian had set it, and was conducting a full investigation that involved extensive sniffing, one cautious paw-touch, and a posture I could only describe as deeply distrustful.

“He thinks it’s real,” Adrian said.