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“Is there a dog bed somewhere in this briefing?” I asked, mostly so I wouldn’t say something else. “Or is he going to live against your arm?”

“Back porch.” Mark started to get up, remembered the sixty pounds of trust pressed against his ribs, and instead sort of poured himself upright by inches, keeping a hand on the dog the whole way, unwilling to break the spell. “Come look, but leave him. Don’t carry him. Let him follow if he wants.”

I followed Mark to the back door, and Dosty, torn between his two fears, being near the giant and being away from me, discovered there was no longer a conflict. The giant and I were now walking in the same direction. He came clicking after us on his ridiculous nails, tail doing the low, uncertain helicopter of a dog who had decided, against his own better judgment, to be happy.

On the back porch, as promised, was a dog bed.

Except “dog bed” undersold it.

Mark had built a whole thing.

It had a raised wooden frame, sanded smooth with corners rounded. He’d equipped it with a memory-foam insert and a low lip on three sides. The fourth side opened like a ramp. The whole thing was stained to match the porch, and there was a small overhang built into one end, a little roof or canopy, so a nervous animal could get his back covered and watch the yard at the same time.

“I didn’t know what he’d like,” Mark said, gruff, jamming his free hand in his pocket, going a little pink the way he did when he’d done something kind and got caught. “So I . . . the internet said they like to feel covered on top but see out the front, prey animal thing, so I did the little . . . the roof part. It’s probably stupid. He’s got a bed at your place, I’m sure. This is so dumb—”

“You built my dog a house.”

“It’s a bed.”

“It has a roof, Mark.”

“It’s more of a pergola,” he said, defensive.

I laughed, actually laughed, standing on the back porch of the house where only days ago I’d told him to be careful with my heart. Dosty, at the sound of me laughing, at the sound of me being unafraid, crept forward and put one cautious paw into the wooden frame, and then another. He turned around twice and dropped into the memory foam under his little roof with a sigh like a deflating tire and looked out at the yard, a very skittish king surveying a kingdom he’d been assured was safe.

Mark gazed at the dog in the bed he’d built, and the look on his face, I’d have paid a million bucks to keep it.

Mark made too much food again, obviously.

We ate on the back porch so Dosty wouldn’t have to be alone with his new anxieties. The evening went soft and blue around us, and was, for a while, easy.

Mark had bought brown paper bags, a whole stack of them on the counter. They were a monument to a thing I’d said in passing that he’d simply, quietly, made true.

I kept finding things like that.

All night.

The evidence of a man who listened.

“You’re doing that thing,” Mark said over dinner. “The quiet cataloguing thing. I can see you doing it. What’d I do?”

“You bought paper bags.”

“You said the plastic ones scare him.”

“I said that once, in your bedroom, in the middle of a completely different conversation.”

“Yeah, well.” He slopped another mountain of food onto my plate that I hadn’t asked for and didn’t need. “I remember things. Eat. You’re too skinny. My mother would hate it. God rest her, she’d have force-fed you.”

And there it was, in the middle of the sweetness, the small crack of something under it. He’d mentioned his mother twice now and both times fast and past tense and moved-on-from. I noticed, and I didn’t push, because I of all people knew the mechanics of a door you kept shut. He’d open it when he opened it. I held on to the tenderness and left the grief alone.

But something else was slithered beneath the evening, too, and I’d been feeling it since I walked in. Mark was doing the sweetness at full volume, with the dog and the bed and the bags and the food. Beneath it, he was somewhere else, working something. His eyes would go middle-distance between one joke and the next. His jaw would set. Then he’d come back and pour me more wine and be Mark again. Twice I caught him looking at the house itself. Not at me, at the bones of it.

“You’re doing your thing, too,” I said finally.

“What thing?”

“The middle-distance thing. You keep leaving. Where do you go?”