Page 38 of The Jackal

"No," I said. My voice came out like a rusted hinge. It was the first word I'd managed in a while. "That's—thank you. For that."

I stood under the hot water until the brown ran clear at the drain, and I cried where the sound of the water could hold it.

When I came out, there were clothes laid on the bench that weren't mine—soft, expensive, warm from somewhere—and two more women in the bedroom beyond who I hadn't met.

The first one was standing at the window with the unhurried poise of a woman who has never once in her life been caught looking flustered, tall and put-together in a way that made me newly aware I was wearing borrowed clothes and no makeup and my hair in a wet rope. She turned when I came out and gave me a slow, assessing once-over—not unkind, the opposite of unkind, the fast head-to-toe of a person checking you for damage.

"You're not in shock," she announced, like a verdict. "Pupils are fine, you're tracking, you're pissed off underneath, which is the right thing to be. Good." She crossed the room and took both my hands and turned them over, looking at my knuckles, my wrists, quick and clinical, and something in the gesture didn't match the flawless rest of her at all. "I'm Sloane. I know I look like I sell serums on the internet. I did do that, for a while. But my husband was a medic and he taught me a few things, so, let me be the one to tell you you're going to be fine, physically. Ignore anybody who tells you you'll feel fine, because that part takes longer and they're lying to be nice."

I stared at her. And then, God, help me, I laughed—one cracked, astonished note, because it was exactly the right thing and exactly the wrong thing and she'd known it would land.

"There she is," Sloane said, satisfied, and let go of my hands.

The other woman had hung back by the foot of the bed, and where Sloane was all polish, this one was all warmth—loose and easy and a little rumpled, a callus on her fingers that I clocked the way I clock things, a voice when she spoke that had music living down under it, even in plain speech.

"I'm Anna." She didn't do the once-over. She just looked at my face, at whatever was written there, and her eyes filled. "I heard about your dog. Duke." She said his name like it mattered, like she'd bothered to learn it on the way up the stairs so she could say it to me right. "I'm so sorry. There's no fixing it and I'm not going to try. I just wanted to say his name to you, because people stop saying their names too fast. I've always thought that's the loneliest part."

And that undid me worse than any of it, because she was right, and because a stranger had understood the exact shape of a grief I hadn't even reached yet.

I sat down hard on the edge of that big bed and Anna sat beside me and didn't touch me, just sat, a warm presence at my side. Joy lowered herself carefully onto my other side with a hand on my back, and Claire dropped cross-legged onto the floor in front of me like a woman settling in for a siege. Sloane leaned on the bedpost with her arms crossed and her sharp eyes soft.

For a moment, the five of us just breathed in that quiet room while my two survivors nudged at the door.

I had come to this city six months ago and known no one. I had built a careful, narrow life out of dogs and a job and a phone that connected me to two parents a few hours away, and I had told myself it was enough. I had been, if I was honest, lonely down to the bone the whole time. And now, I sat gutted on a stranger's bed and was not alone at all. I was surrounded. These women I barely knew had closed around me like a fist, and not one of them wanted anything from me. I did not have the first idea what I'd done to deserve being caught like this, right when I was falling.

"I don't understand you people," I said, wetly. "You don't even know me."

"We know Cash now,” Claire said, from the floor. "Which means we know you. That's how this works. You're one of us now. You got drafted in the worst possible way and I'm sorry for that, but you're in, and in this family, in means in." She reached up and squeezed my knee. "Nobody's leaving you alone in it. Not for one second. Get used to it."

Somewhere in the middle of being held like that, a thing surfaced through the fog—a small, ordinary, undone thing—and I sat up straight.

"Banjo," I said.

Claire blinked. "What about him?"

"He's still at the kennel. I was—" It came up my throat thick. "I was going to bring him to you this morning. That was the plan. I was going to load him up and deliver him myself and get him set up in your yard with the right food and the right crate, and I never—" I pressed the heel of my hand to my eye. "I never got to. Because of—everything."

"Maggie." Claire's voice went soft. "The dog can wait. You do not need to be thinking about⁠—"

"I do, though." And I did, and it wasn't about the dog, or it was entirely about the dog, the way everything with me is. It was about there being one thing in the whole burning world I still knew how to do right. One creature I could still see safely home. "He's been passed around three times already. Everybody keeps deciding he's too much and sending him back. I am not going to be the fourth person who was going to and didn't." I was already reaching for my phone, still miraculously in the pocket of the jeans they'd peeled off me, cracked but alive. "I can't drive right now. But I can send for him."

I texted Dani. My hands weren't steady and it took three tries. Can you or Walt run Banjo out to a foster address today? Something came up, I can't do the transport. Foster's expecting him. I'll send the address. It's a good home. I made sure.

The last line, I looked at for a second. Then, I sent it, and the three dots came back almost at once—Dani, up early, Dani who never let me down—On it. You okay?? And I couldn't answer that one, so I sent her the address and put the phone in my lap.

"He'll be here by this afternoon," I told Claire. "Walt or Dani'll bring him. Just—when he gets here, let him have the run of the yard first, before the crate, he settles better if he's decided the place is his before you close a door on him." My voice wobbled. "He knocks you down when he loves you. He's going to knock you flat, Claire. He picked you off a concrete floor. Don't let anybody tell you he's too much."

Claire's eyes had gone bright and streaming. "I would never," she said. "God, Maggie. You're lying here in the worst hour of your life making sure my dog gets settled right."

"It's the one thing I know how to do," I said.

"No," Joy said quietly, from beside me, her hand warm and steady on my back. "It's not the one thing. It's just the thing you do when the rest of it's too big to hold. You put the love somewhere you can reach it." She smiled, sad and certain, the way she'd smiled over her flowers. "You'll find you've got more of it than one dog can hold. This family runs on exactly that. You're going to fit right in."

I looked around that soft, bright room at the four of them, all turned toward me like flowers toward the one bit of sun.

I put my face in my hands and let them watch me cry, which was its own kind of surrender. Not one of them looked away.

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