Part 2
Dr. Malik had the crate open before Flint could hit it again. Noah held the door steady while she wrapped the paw in a towel, found the split nail, and told the driver to take the other dogs without him.
“He’ll reopen every old injury before you reach the highway,” she said. “This transport is over.”
The damage was minor. The question of where Flint would sleep was not. Elise worked down the names on her foster list, called two numbers, and ended both conversations with the same tired thanks. When she put the phone away, she looked at Noah.
“No.”
“I haven’t asked.”
“Your face has.”
Elise glanced toward the medical corridor. “Three nights. You’re close enough to bring him over each day, and he already knows you.”
Flint had located Noah’s second glove on top of a folded blanket. He chewed the thumb while watching them. Noah reached for it, and the puppy retreated with precise confidence.
“Three nights,” Noah said at last. “Not an audition.”
“Of course not.” Elise was already walking toward the forms.
Before they left, Noah took Flint to Clover’s gate. Their noses met in the narrow space beside the latch. Clover shifted her sore leg so she could remain there, and Flint did not turn until Noah promised they would return in the morning.
Noah drove around the service road rather than carrying the supplies through the trees. In his mudroom, Flint found the old dog door before Noah remembered it existed. He pushed through the stiff flap and stepped into the yard as if he had been given a map.
The fence was five feet high and looked sound. Noah checked the gate, leaned on every post, and pressed his boot along the bottom rail. A dusting of snow covered most of the ground, except beneath the porch roof where the dirt stayed soft and dark. He found no gap and brought Flint inside.
The puppy inspected the living room, hall, and kitchen, stole a sock from the laundry basket, and took the turn beside the refrigerator too fast. His feet slid out from under him. He sprang up and glared at the floor.
“It has always done that,” Noah said. “You’re the new variable.”
He traded the sock for a shelter toy and laid an old runner across the slickest stretch. Flint followed him through supper, sitting close enough that his chin hovered beside Noah’s knee. Noah attempted silence for several minutes before explaining why food on a human plate did not belong to a foster dog.
He had set out a stainless-steel bowl from the shelter bag, yet his hand went first to the cabinet where Ronan’s heavy ceramic bowl remained behind a stack of pans. Noah closed the door without taking it down. Flint heard the hinge, trotted over, and inspected the wrong cabinet with such seriousness that Noah had to turn away before the expression on his face became anything he would need to name.
A piece of turkey fell from his fork. Flint caught it before it touched the floor.
“Evidence tampering,” Noah said.
For more than a year, he had turned on the kitchen radio the instant he came home. Voices filled the rooms without asking anything from him. That night, a thud in the spare room interrupted the weather report before he could switch it on.
Flint emerged carrying a faded blue ball. A split seam crossed one side, stippled with tooth marks Noah recognized. Ronan had abandoned newer toys for that ruined ball and continued dropping it at Noah’s feet long after it bounced sideways.
Noah thought he had packed it with the collar and leashes. Flint had found dust beneath the low shelf where the ball must have rolled. He placed it against Noah’s boot and waited.
Noah did not throw it. He sat on the floor with his back against the wall. Flint watched him, then stretched beside the ball and rested one paw over it. The pipes clicked as the furnace came on. No radio spoke over them.
At bedtime, Noah put a cushion outside his room. Flint circled it, lay down for half a minute, and returned to the front window. Through the pines, a square of light from North Fork’s medical wing shone between the trunks.
“That’s where she is,” Noah said from the hall. “You haven’t lost her.”
One white ear turned. The puppy kept his nose against the cold glass until his breath clouded it. When Noah called again, soft paws followed him down the hall. Flint brought the blue ball and slept with it tucked beneath his jaw.
Noah woke at 5:43 a.m. without knowing why. The alarm remained dark and silent. He listened for claws shifting on the floor outside his door and heard nothing.
The cushion was empty.
The ball lay beside it.
He checked the front room, the kitchen, and the bathroom. In the mudroom, the dog door hung at an angle. Its flap had caught against the frame, letting a blade of cold air into the house.
Noah shoved his feet into boots without socks and went outside. The gate remained latched. For several seconds the yard looked exactly as it had the night before. Then he saw a mound of dark soil beneath the sheltered fence line.
Flint had dug where the ground had not frozen. The hollow was wider on the yard side, narrow beneath the fence, and just large enough for a determined puppy to flatten himself through. Noah pushed his hand into it until cold soil filled the lines of his knuckles.
“Flint!”
The pines gave back the click of bare branches. Beyond them lay the service road, the shelter, and farther north the county highway.
Noah doubled back through the kitchen, dragged on his coat, and snatched a lead from its wall hook. Only after stepping onto the porch did he recognize Ronan’s brown leather. For one sharp second it was on the passenger seat again, neatly coiled after the veterinary staff had taken the collar.
He left it on the rail and found a nylon slip lead in the foster bag. At the open gate he looked toward the black spaces between the trees. Nothing moved, and he could no longer hear so much as a paw in the snow.
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