Page 20 of Warrior Security
“You okay?” It came out before I’d decided to ask it.
“What? Yeah. Of course.” She picked up the clipboard she’d left on the feed shelf and tucked it under her arm. “Dobby gets clingy in the afternoons. I was just giving him some attention. Did you eat? There’s leftover soup in the farmhouse if you want it. Nothing fancy. Whatever vegetables I had lying around.”
“I’m fine.”
“There’s bread too. From the bakery. Lena dropped it off yesterday. I’d grab some before I get to it, because I will eat all of it. Zero self-control when it comes to bread.”
Every sentence aimed at me. Every question about what I needed, whether I’d eaten, whether I was comfortable. The conversation tipped away from her and toward me so smoothly that if I hadn’t been watching it happen, I’d have missed the pivot entirely.
I let it go. I didn’t have standing to push her on what was really bothering her.
“Before you head out for chores and stuff,” she said, “can I ask a favor?” She walked toward the kennels, and I followed. She stopped at Tova’s run. The yellow lab was lying on her side, her tail sweeping the floor in slow arcs when she saw Lark.
“I’ve been a little worried about Tova the last couple of days. She hasn’t been quite herself. Nothing I can pin down exactly, she’s just been a bit off. Quieter than usual.”
The dog looked fine to me. She looked the way she’d looked every other time I’d seen her: a dog entirely at peace with the world and in no hurry to do anything about it.
“Would you mind keeping an eye on her this afternoon and the next few days? Take her with you while you’re working. Just so I know someone’s watching her.”
“You want me to take the dog.”
“She’s easy. She won’t be in your way. Definitely won’t run off.”
I looked at Tova. Tova looked at me. Her tail thumped twice.
I shrugged. What the hell. “Sure.”
“Thank you.” Lark opened the kennel and clipped a lead to Tova’s collar. She handed it to me, her fingers brushing mine during the transfer. “She likes to lie in the sun. Don’t let her eat anything weird. She has a history.”
“What kind of history?”
“A sock. An entire corncob. Part of a tennis ball. She’s not picky about her snacks—” Her phone rang. She pulled it from her back pocket, glanced at the screen, and something moved across her face that she smoothed away in under a second. “I have to take this. It’s— Yeah, thanks for helping with Tova.”
She was already walking away. Out of the barn, across the lot, her voice fading as she went.
I stood in the barn holding a leash attached to a dog I hadn’t asked for.
“All right,” I said to her. “Come on.”
I went back to the fence line. Tova followed. I let her off the lead once we were in the pasture, and she didn’t go anywhere. She found a patch of sun near the post I was setting and lowered herself into the grass with a long exhale, her chin on her paws.
I dug. She watched. I didn’t talk to her, and I didn’t know what I would have said if I’d tried. I’d never had a dog, never wanted one. They were fine from a distance, but they wanted something from you, attention or affection or some form of emotional exchange that I didn’t have the bandwidth for.
Tova didn’t seem to want anything. She just lay there, breathing, occasionally lifting her head when a bird crossed overhead or one of the horses moved in the far paddock. I set the post. Tamped the concrete. Moved to the next hole. Tova got up, relocated to a new patch of sun three feet from where I was working, and settled back down with the same long exhale.
We did this for two hours. A man and a dog who didn’t know each other, sharing the same ground without a reason to.
Gunfire. Dirt I could taste at the back of my throat. The light was wrong: too bright, too flat, the kind that burned shadows off the ground and turned everything white. A vehicle that wasn’t there anymore. Hands pulling at metal that used to be a door.
Someone screaming and then not screaming, and the silence after was worse than the sound.
Then a rooftop. Or a road. Or both at once, the way they always blurred when the dream had been running longenough. Reid’s voice cutting through the noise, close and steady, saying my name or saying something else… I couldn’t hold on to it long enough to know which. He was right there. Right beside me the way he’d been for ten years, and I was reaching for him when?—
I opened my eyes.
The ceiling of the cabin. Dark. My shirt was soaked through, and my heart was hammering at a rate that had nothing to do with where I actually was. The sheets were twisted around my legs, and my jaw ached from clenching. The gunfire was still ringing somewhere behind my ears, fading out slow, the way it always did, like a station losing its signal.
I lay there and waited for my body to come down. It took a while. It always took a while.
