It was hard to think of Zara without thinking of how she’d passed. She was hit by the debris of an IED and lived just long enough afterward to slip away on a medevac transport back to base. To keep from experiencing the suffocating loss that was attempting to rush in alongside his thoughts, he conjured an image of a steel lockbox, visualized shoving his feelings inside and tossing away the key.
Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn’t. He’d told one person—his best buddy and fellow marine, Zach—about the imagery he conjured to lock away the feelings of pain and loss. “Kurt, my friend, forget the box,” Zach had said. “Forget the lock. Nothing does well being locked away. Picture yourself standing alongside something peaceful, like the ocean. Picture yourself not having to hold it in. Picture yourself letting it go.”
The advice seemed to make sense, but Kurt had never been to the ocean, and he had no idea how to simply let go, but he’d seen lots of boxes and lots of keys, and he knew how to hold things in. So Zara and the pain of losing her—along with a whole lot of other shit that really stank—got locked away in the heaviest steel box he could imagine.
She wasn’t the only dog he’d lost during his service, but losing her had hurt the worst. It wasn’t the way she got hit with so much shrapnel or that she struggled. It was how she’d looked at him before she died. Like she still trusted him to make things better.
After her, he didn’t take on another dog of his own. In fact, losing her had been part of the reason he’d transferred to Central America. He was done with the desert, and he was done with the horror of IEDs.
But he found that training Honduran troops in the jungles of Central America wasn’t any better than the desert. Their world was just as full of insurgents, only they were camouflaged guerillas of the forest, fighting against a government they believed was tyrannous. Fighting to protect the cocaine they smuggled into America and to provide for their families. It was a jungle, not a desert, but IEDs were still the enemies’ best friend.
After several months of this, Kurt was ready to come home. Now, a little over two weeks past earning his discharge, he was knee-deep in something else bigger than himself. Like saving the lives of his fellow marines, rehabbing these dogs was an honorable path and one Kurt could be proud of. It didn’t matter that his grandfather had dragged a hand slowly, deliberately over the top of his thinning hair when Kurt had told him; Kurt knew he’d made the right decision.
He’d felt it seeing the old mansion for the first time yesterday morning, and felt it again last night after he’d collapsed onto the musty featherbed and lay in the dark, listening to the quiet hush that fell over the house. He’d brought his own pillow and a light blanket to toss over the top of the bed till he could find time to do a load of sheets, assuming the old washer and dryer worked.
As he’d drifted off, he’d heard the dogs downstairs breathing and shifting in their kennels. There’d been a soft breeze through the open windows, and for the second time, he could have sworn he heard his nana’s singsong voice carried on the wind.
Looking around at the dogs making themselves at home in the runs and the enthralled volunteers, Kurt suspected he was meant to be here. It wasn’t just the remarkable blond, or the house whose many projects called his name, or the thirty-seven dogs who deserved better lives than the ones they’d come from. It was all of them put together.
This sent his thoughts spiraling into a tangled mess of questions while most of the group laughed at the Argentine mastiff’s continued antics and Patrick studied the giant from far enough away to not to disturb him. If Kurt was meant to be here, then something intentional was supposed to come of this. And he wanted to know what it was.
But who was he kidding? He’d stopped believing in fate when one of his buddies was severely injured after passing Kurt and his IED-detecting shepherd because Kurt had paused to give the animal a drink. Things happened, or they didn’t happen. Those who survived moved on.
Locking himself off from his thoughts, he finished wrapping up the extra mesh fencing, then rejoined the group. The volunteers had drained their bottles of water but were hanging around until the mastiff was finished putting on a show, which didn’t seem like it would be anytime soon.
Perhaps tired of them all, the giant German shepherd mix urinated on the gate, then, having stood guard for half an hour, plopped to the ground with a muffled sigh. Kurt wondered how many homes the big dog had passed through. And in how many of them he’d been traumatized. The cautious dog had no reason to believe this new set of circumstances would be any different.
But that was okay, Kurt thought, feeling a surge of hope. It would be their job to show him otherwise.
Chapter 10
Ida Greene could come up with a dozen reasons to be upset over the goings-on next door, but at her doctor’s advice, she’d been practicing “complete tolerance” for twenty-three days. If she broke her streak now, all the
