Part 7
Four months later, Willa asked to go back to Quarry Ridge. Kate did not answer immediately. She turned off the kitchen faucet and dried her hands while Willa explained the plan exactly as she and her counselor had made it: a weekday afternoon, when the park was quiet; her mother and Daniel nearby; no requirement to reach the shed if her body said no.
“And Rook?” Kate asked.
“He comes if his body says yes.”
Dr. Price approved a short, level walk. Daniel checked the forecast twice, packed water, and resisted the urge to turn the outing into an operation. Rook rode in the back seat of Daniel’s personal truck wearing his brown collar. The blue ribbon, sun-faded now, tapped softly against the brass tag.
At the park entrance, Willa could hear children on the distant playground. A swing chain squeaked. Someone bounced a basketball against pavement. The ordinary sounds frightened her more than silence would have; they were almost exactly the sounds from the day she followed the butterfly.
Kate offered her hand. Willa shook her head, then took it anyway.
They followed the marked path until the maintenance shed appeared between the trees. The broken service door was gone. Fresh boards covered the opening, unpainted and pale against the weathered green wall. Willa stopped so abruptly that Rook moved ahead of her.
Her body supplied details she had not asked it to remember. The sharp smell of crushed fern. The service road slanting down to the right. The low branch that had scraped her cheek while the man carried her. Her wrist began to ache where no bruise had remained for months.
Kate stepped close but did not touch her. “We can turn around.”
“Don’t say it yet.”
They waited. A mosquito settled on Daniel’s sleeve, and he let it stay there. Rook looked back at Willa, panting lightly from the walk, then faced the shed again.
His body changed. Nose high, ears forward, he began to angle across the path the way he had been trained to block access to a threat.
Daniel’s hand rose, the old command ready in him, and then he lowered it. Willa watched Rook search Daniel’s face for instruction. Then she held out her palm for the leash.
“Let me.”
Daniel gave it to her. Willa’s first step went backward, and the leash drew slack between her and Rook. The new boards did not make the shed harmless; her lungs still lost the pace she had practiced. She rubbed the ribbon at Rook’s collar, feeling the ridge of the knot.
“With me,” she said.
It was not a police command, and Rook did not perform a perfect heel. He took two steps, stopped to sniff a fern, then came alongside her when the leash reached its gentle limit. At the corner of the shed, Willa’s legs locked again. She counted the brass screws in the new boards—four along the top, five down one side—and waited until the trees stopped tipping toward her.
“Still with you,” Daniel said from several feet back.
Willa nodded. He did not come closer.
They passed the place where Daniel had sat in the leaves while Willa clung to Rook’s neck. She did not kneel there or say anything important. She kept walking until the shed was behind them, then turned once to see it from the other side. From there it was only a park building with a dented gutter and weeds growing through the foundation.
At the next bench, Rook lay down without being told. Daniel poured water into a collapsible bowl. Rook drank, splashed half of it onto his front paws, and then rolled one shoulder into the grass with a satisfied groan. The ribbon collected a burr. Willa laughed while she worked it free.
That evening Daniel and Rook stayed for dinner at the Rowans’ house. Rook stationed himself beneath the table, not from vigilance but because Mark dropped pieces of chicken when he thought Kate was not looking. Afterward he fell asleep on the kitchen rug with his scarred side toward the room.
When it was time for bed, Daniel reached for the leash.
“He can stay downstairs a little longer,” Willa said.
Kate studied her. “Are you sure?”
Willa looked at Rook. In the old days, the first creak of a stair would have lifted his head. Now one hind foot twitched in a dream, and the ribbon lay loose beneath his paw.
“He’s tired,” she said. “I’m okay.”
She went upstairs without taking the blue blanket from the hall closet. She crossed her room, left the door open a hand’s width, and turned off the lamp.
In the kitchen below, Rook slept through the click.