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After a few days, we’d gone to the hospital to pick up Walter. We’d taken Riley and Puddles with us. The teenager and the old man had hit it off right away and Riley had been a huge help in getting Walter settled into our home. The teen had moved to the second floor of the house so that Walter could have the first-floor bedroom. The knee surgery had been a great success because Walter was able to walk more easily, though he still needed in-home care and PT.
Enter Nurse Ratchet, whose real name was Lincoln or Linc for short. Walter was relentless with the President Lincoln jokes but the handsome, young, live-in male nurse took it all in stride. It’d been odd having so many people suddenly moving into my house all at once, but I wasn’t exactly bothered by it.
In truth, I was loving every moment of it.
It was often chaotic and Ford and I were still trying to figure out all the details of building a life together that was filling up quickly with our own unique brand of quasi family members. Ford, Riley, and I had had to work fast to get the rest of the house in good enough shape for Walter and Linc to move in. We’d ended up giving Linc the third floor so he’d have some space to himself. Linc was friendly and had a unique form of patience when it came to working with Walter, but he didn’t talk much about himself. Riley and Walter had become two peas in a pod in the last fourteen days and it was far too often that I overheard the old man and the teenager conspiring about what prank they should play on Linc next.
Riley’s life was still a series of ups and downs. I’d finally been forced to tell him that his parents had severed their parental rights and weren’t contesting my seeking custody of him. Riley had tried to be strong when he’d heard the news, but he’d broken down when it had really hit him that his parents had abandoned him. Ford and I had held him between us as we’d promised that we’d always be his family, but it was Walter who’d taken the boy outside for a long walk around the property. We had no clue what he’d said to Walter, but by the time they’d returned, Riley had been smiling and Walter had been regaling him with war stories, though not any grisly ones.
It was that night that Ford and I had talked about the possibility of asking Walter if he wanted to stay with us on a permanent basis. We had more than enough room and Ford and I had admitted to each other that we both wanted the same thing.
A family of our own.
We might not have ever dreamed that our family would consist of a foul-mouthed old man, a traumatized teenager who’d been abandoned by the people who should have loved him most, a diva dog who was still playing hard to get with a certain wolf-hybrid, and a hot young male nurse that apparently still put some ding in Walter’s dong, but we had absolutely no complaints. And while Ford and I both thought Linc was attractive, our dongs were only dinging for each other.
And Riley… well, Riley had his eyes set on someone else completely. Thankfully, my deputy, Alex, had figured out that the teenager was crushing hard on him and had made sure not to send the boy any mixed signals.
Which was a good thing or I would have had to kill Alex and hire a new deputy.
We’d finally learned the truth about the man who’d preyed on Riley. It had been one of his teachers in high school. My old captain had taken pleasure in having the man arrested and he’d done it in front of his wife and the entire school during an awards ceremony where the piece of shit predator had been up for “Teacher of the Year.” Within twenty-four hours of his arrest, three other boys had come forward claiming they’d been forced to have sex with the teacher. As much as it’d pained me to see there’d been other victims, it meant that the son of a bitch would likely spend the rest of his life behind bars.
“No, they’re fine,” Ford said. “Linc is keeping an eye on them and Isaac said he and Newt would stop by and pick up Riley today so he can work at the sanctuary.”
“Right,” I said.
I knew all this, of course, but I knew Ford needed to talk to keep shit from bottling up inside that box in his head. He’d hoped the thing was gone for good, but I knew it would take time for him to learn how to let his emotions out rather than hide them away. We all had some version of a place in our mind where we could put things that we might not necessarily be ready to deal with. Ford’s place just happened to have a little more stuff in it.
