Page 62 of Rescued By the Dog Trainer

My hands hover over the compression straps. The pull is instinctive. When a deployment goes bad, when a mission compromises the perimeter, pack the kit. Stow the gear, zip the canvas shut, and wait by the tailgate for the transport to haul out of the hot zone.

Down in the valley, the world's waiting.

My phone vibrates against the nightstand, buzzing across varnished wood. The glowing screen lights the dark room.

An email sits at the top of my inbox from Mercy Flight Northwest in Spokane. The offer of an appointment for a civilian flight nurse. Sixty days to sign the contract, pack the duffel, and pretend a medical board did not cut my career out from under me in San Antonio.

Mercy Flight Northwest · Offer of Appointment · Response required within 60 days.

The offer is an illusion, a sixty-day timer reminding me that the life I built is gone, and the only thing waiting for me in Spokane is a formal medical failure. My right knee won't clear thirty seconds of high-G turbulence, let alone lifting litters on a civilian rotorcraft. Yet running feels easier than standing in this room.

Pack the duffel. Throw the bags into the back of the 4Runner. Drive down the mountain pass before the new storm system hits the high country, and leave Sergeant Jason Pike to freeze inside his cedar bunker.

He made his position clear. In his mind, five years of survival is an invoice he can't stomach. The moment he learned I was the hands holding his artery together, the man who asked me to stay on those porch steps vanished behind twenty tons of military permafrost.

I owe you my life. But Sortie 402 is over.

The words echo in my skull, cold as the draft off the sills. I never asked for payment. All I ever did was do my job to the best of my ability. Sure, it cost me my knee and my career, but I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

For Jason.

For any wounded warrior.

No scorecards. No invoices. I just do my job. It's not my fault that he sees it differently.

I set the phone facedown on the nightstand. Across the room, the black vinyl ledger rests under yellow lamplight.

I cross to the writing desk, dragging the right boot. Fatigue grinds deep into the joint. Cold vinyl bites into my fingertips when I pull out the wooden chair and turn the heavy pages.

Two hundred and thirteen names. Soldiers with shredded lungs, compound fractures, burn trauma from roadside IEDs, airmen pulled from cockpits after hard landings in Kandahar. Every line recorded in neat blue ink, tracked across eleven years of flights from Bagram to Landstuhl.

And then page forty-four.

SORTIE 402 | C-17 GLOBEMASTER III | BAGRAM TO LANDSTUHL

CASUALTY 214: SGT PIKE, J.

DIAGNOSIS: TRAUMATIC PROXIMAL FEMORAL TRANSECTION. FIELD GRAFT FAILURE.

STATUS: ALIVE. HANDOFF TO LANDSTUHL CCATT.

Beside his name, the paper is stained with a pale brown ring where coffee spilled during a hard touchdown five years ago.

For five years, this book was an anchor. Every time the nightmares came—every time the scream of cargo turbines or the smell of burning copper woke me in a sweat—I opened this page. I looked at the word ALIVE and reminded myself that the blood on my boots wasn't in vain. My knee was destroyed, my career was buried in a VA filing cabinet, but Sergeant Pike, J. had a pulse.

I didn't come to Angel's Peak to collect on that.

I came because my purpose ran out. Because after the medical board in San Antonio ended my flight status, waking up in the morning without someone dying on my shift felt foreign.

A quiet knock taps against the bedroom door.

"Maren?" Mabel's voice comes through the pine planks. "You awake in there, honey?"

"Come in." I close the ledger with a quiet snap.

The door opens, letting in the rich aroma of cinnamon and warm butter. Mabel Wilson steps across the threshold carrying a ceramic mug topped with a cloud of whipped cream and a small plate with two gingerbread cookies. Her gray curls are tied back in a calico bandana, her fleece cardigan buttoned to her throat.

"Saw your light under the door." Mabel sets the tray on the dresser, her warm eyes scanning the open duffel on the bed. Her expression remains steady. She folds her hands over her apron. "Packing early for something?"