Chapter 2

Four years earlier

"Excuse me — excuse me, please, a dog is hurt, we need a vet."

Killian was already on his feet before he'd decided to be, scooping the boy's words up out of the air and acting on them before his own brain had caught up. The kid couldn't have been more than twenty-one, his jacket smeared dark across one sleeve, his arms full of a dog that wasn't moving the way a healthy dog moves.

"What happened to him?" Palak asked, already reaching for gloves, already in the particular gear she shifted into whenever something walked through her door bleeding.

"Found him by the dumpsters behind the lot," the boy said, breathless. "Looks like he got into it with another dog. Maybe more than one."

"You did the right thing bringing him here." Palak motioned for her assistant. "Let's get him onto the table."

"I can't see a damsel in distress," Killian said, falling into step beside her with the dog still half in his arms, "or in this case, I suppose, a canis in distress." He smiled — the kind of smile that had a way of making a chaotic room feel briefly, deceptively calm.

Palak didn't even look up. "He's always like this," she told the boy, not unkindly. "Never changes. Helps anybody without thinking twice about it. You'd think it would've gotten him in trouble by now."

"It has," Killian said. "Several times."

"Wait outside," Palak told him, already turning back to the table. "Let me see what we're working with."

"I know I can count on you," Killian said, stepping back out of the room, and there was something almost boyish in the way he said it, like a kid leaving his bike with the only mechanic in town he actually trusted.

* * *

He hadn't made it five steps into the waiting room before he noticed her.

She was crouched near the door, knees tucked up, talking softly to a second dog — smaller, scruffier, clearly someone's idea of a rescue gone slightly sideways — while her friend stood over her with her arms crossed and an expression that suggested this was not how either of them had planned to spend the evening.

"We found him in our lane," the girl on the floor was saying, to no one in particular, or maybe to the dog. "He was just lying there. I couldn't leave him."

"June," her friend said, "we are now extremely late for a party that I would just like to remind you we already RSVP'd to."

"We can't abandon him, Olly," June said, not looking up. "Look at him. He doesn't even understand what's happening to him."

Olly sighed in the specific way of someone who has had this argument before and lost it every time. "You are not thinking about keeping it. Are you."

"I am absolutely thinking about keeping it."

"June—"

"Let's get him looked at first," June said, already standing, already moving toward the counter like the conversation was over, because as far as she was concerned, it was.

Killian watched her from across the room without entirely meaning to. There was nothing remarkable about the scene — a girl, a stray, a friend losing an argument she should have known better than to start — and yet something about her held his attention longer than it had any right to. He couldn't have said what it was. Just that she moved like someone who hadn't yet learned to expect the world to disappoint her, and it made him want to know if that was still true by the end of the night.

The front desk took June's payment and handed her a slip of paper with a number on it, and she carried it back to the row of plastic chairs like it was something fragile.

"You came to the right place," Killian said, before he could think better of it. "They'll get him sorted."

June glanced up, startled, then offered a quick, distracted smile. "Thanks. I hope so." She didn't look at him long enough for it to be anything. Her mind was clearly somewhere else, already circling the dog, the wait, the party she wasn't at.

Her phone rang before she'd even sat down. Killian watched her go rigid at the screen for half a second before she answered, and something about that flinch — small, automatic, the kind of reaction that comes from practice — caught his attention in a way the rest of the evening hadn't.

"Pick it up," Olly muttered under her breath. "You know what he's like if you don't."

"Hi," June said into the phone, her voice gone careful in a way it hadn't been a moment ago.

A pause. Then, lower: "Yeah, we couldn't — we found a dog, he was hurt, we had to take him in."

Another pause, longer this time. Killian couldn't hear the other end of the call, but he didn't need to. He could read it in the way June's shoulders drew up toward her ears, the way her free hand pressed flat against her knee like she was bracing for something.

"We'll talk when I get home," she said finally, and hung up before whoever it was could say anything else.

"You're so dead," Olly said, only half joking.

"It doesn't matter." June reached down to scratch behind the dog's ear through the gap in the carrier. "Anything for my new best friend."

Killian said nothing, but he kept watching, longer than he should have, turning the moment over the way you turn over a coin that doesn't quite look right.

Thirty minutes later, Palak came to find him.

"Good news," she said. "Cleaned the wound, wrapped it up. He'll need a few days here so we can keep an eye on the stitches, but he's going to be fine."

"Thank god." Killian exhaled like he'd been the one holding his breath the whole time. "Hear that, big guy? You're going to be just fine. And if anyone gives you trouble after this, you let me know — we'll go handle it together."

"You talk to dogs like they understand business strategy," Palak said, peeling off her gloves.

"He gets it. I can tell." He glanced at her sideways. "You're still coming tonight, right? David's thing."

"Don't ask me, ask your best friend," Palak said. "He's the one who invited you like it was a legal summons."

"Fine, fine. I'll be there. Pick you up at eight?"

"Eight works."

Across the waiting room, June had gone quiet in a way that had nothing to do with the dog. She wasn't jealous, not exactly — not of the easy back-and-forth between Killian and Palak, the kind that only exists between people who've known each other long enough to stop being careful with their words. What caught in her chest, sharp and unexpected, was something closer to longing. She couldn't remember the last time she'd had a friend who talked to her that easily, that lightly, without something underneath it she had to manage.

She'd never told anyone that the loneliest she ever felt was in rooms full of people who supposedly knew her.

She didn't know yet that the man laughing with the vet across the room would, in four months, hand her a job and change the shape of her life. She only knew that something about him made the noise in her head quiet down for a minute, and she filed that away without understanding why, the way you remember a stranger's face on a train without ever expecting to see it again.