She wore a teal sweater. I could have cheered. I never wanted to see her in some version of blah again, which made it all that more imperative for this to work.
I opened my handbag and pulled out the remnants of her tiara, setting it silently on the coffee table.
She swallowed audibly. “How…?”
“On a case. I’m so sorry. I should have taken it off, but everything happened so fast.” I put Mrs. Hudson on the sofa and steeled myself. This was going to be the hard part. “How about you keep the pug?”
“Excuse me?”
I took a deep breath. “I know I can’t replace the tiara, but the two of you have bonded. I’m happy to help you take care of her.”
Priya let the puppy lick her fingers. It was working. I’d ruined her tiara and I felt awful, but I’d given her something else that was special to her. Animals were a great source of comfort and could help her move forward.
“I would have forgiven you, you know,” she said. “If you’d allowed me the space to feel sad and angry for a couple of days, this would have blown over. It was an accident. But giving me the dog? God, Ash. How clueless are you?”
This was a great plan. Wasn’t it? Hadn’t I gotten better at seeing others more clearly, and in turn anticipating their emotional needs? “I was trying to make it up to you,” I said softly.
“You can’t. But instead of acknowledging that fact and letting me have my space, you treated me like a child, bribing me with a freaking puppy, and completely invalidating my feelings. I don’t want your dog.”
“She’s not—” At Priya’s hard stare, I shut my mouth.
Shaking her head, she walked into her room and closed the door.
I stayed there in the common area, Mrs. Hudson panting amicably at my feet. This was supposed to have gone so much differently. “I really blew that one, huh?” I said to the dog. “I pulled the same overprotective crap on her that Levi pulled on me. I can be pretty dense for a smart woman.”
Mrs. Hudson put her head on my shoe consolingly and then scrambled into my lap. I sighed and checked the time. If I hurried, I could drop her off at the animal shelter and still make it to the airport since I was only taking a carry-on. Except I’d have to gather all her stuff and she needed a quick walk and a feed and the thought of her whimpering in a cage all alone instead of on her comfy bed in my room left a dull ache in my chest.
The puppy, however, wasn’t an adult human who could fend for herself if I fucked up.
Tatiana had conducted these awful magic experiments on the dog and yet she’d still had hope. She still trusted humans enough to be the first to venture out of that cage. She never bit me or anyone else, no matter how much they deserved it, despite having experienced so much cruelty at the hands of others. She’d trusted me to get the magic out of her, and I had. She was the Pug Who Lived.
How could I not want her after all that?
I pressed a kiss to the top of her sandy-colored head. “For better or for worse, you’re stuck with me.”
She thumped her tail.
“I love you, too. Oh.” Nope. She was just trying to get to the squeaky cow which had gotten stuck between two sofa cushions. “We’ll work on that.”
I left Pri a note saying I was going away for work and not to worry if I wasn’t around.
Levi agreed to watch Mrs. Hudson while I was gone. I was in such a rush, I barely had time to dump the pug and all her stuff into his arms and give him a quick kiss before hopping back in my taxi.
Rafael and I met up in the lounge outside the gate. There wasn’t much to do while we waited to be called for boarding, so we read the closed captioning on the news playing on mute on the mounted TV screens.
Jackson Wu’s sound bite about his friend was being replayed along with news of a looming transit strike.
“I appreciate you sticking to the plan and letting me handle the scroll,” Rafael said. “As promised, I’ll help when it comes time to destroy the Sefer, but until then?” He fiddled with the straps of his leather carry-on bag. “I never want to experience that all-consuming loss of control again.”
Focusing on Rafael’s well-being was better than my shaky existence. “You won’t have to.”
Even for an overnight flight to Mexico, Rafael was nattily attired in another argyle vest and bowtie, his linen shirt sleeves precisely rolled up. “I’ve brought a special container for the scroll.”
“Is it a Tupperware?”
“No. Though they’re surprisingly useful, Ashira. If you stopped for a moment to read the journals, you’d know this as well. Now, we should get through this without anything going—”
I slapped a hand over his mouth. “Let’s not tempt fate, shall we?”
A commercial came on the TV featuring some loving couple videochatting via laptop with their daughter who was away at university.
I pulled out my phone, calling up my contact list of favorites, my finger hovering over Talia’s number. Should I have given her some warning about trying to find Adam? My mother didn’t like surprises and I hadn’t considered what her reaction to her Nefesh husband’s reappearance might be. How could I expect a genuine connection when I hadn’t, even for a second, thought what this could mean, both personally and professionally for her? Given her some warning to prepare?
I might not like Talia’s way of reaching out to me in our new normal, but at least she’d tried. All I kept doing was dropping bombshells on her.
Rafael nudged me. “Look.”
The TV had cut to a story about arrests made in the murder of a brother and sister who’d been part of a dogfighting ring. One of the
