"I was alone for eight months!" Jasmine's voice cracked. She was overwhelmed, hands open at her sides as if she could show him the weight of those months in her palms. "I couldn't handle a dog plus the rent by myself."
Marcus took one step closer. The empty dog bed sat between them like an accusation. "Which shelter? Take me there right now."
She looked at the floor. Then at the framed photo. Then at him. Quiet. Breaking. "Marcus… they might have already put him—"
He did not let her finish. His voice went cold and final, the way it went when he was giving an order that left no room for soft edges. "If that dog is gone… we are gone."
He picked up the duffel. He did not slam the door on purpose; the force of his leaving did it for him. The sound cracked through the modest apartment and left Jasmine alone with the beige carpet, the brown sofa, the empty bowls, and the photograph of a soldier hugging a German Shepherd who was no longer there.
Marcus sat behind the wheel of the old blue sedan for thirty seconds before he remembered how to turn the key. His hands were shaking. He could still smell the apartment — her lotion, the candle, the faint animal scent that lingered even after a dog was gone. Thirteen years. Shadow had been a lanky, oversized puppy when Marcus was sixteen, a birthday gift from an uncle who said a boy needed something that would love him back without conditions. That uncle had been right. Through high school, through the decision to enlist, through the first deployment and the second and the third, Shadow had been the constant. When girlfriends came and went, when friends moved away, when his mother died and the funeral felt like walking through water, Shadow pressed his head against Marcus's knee and stayed.
He remembered the afternoon the puppy arrived: a cardboard box in Uncle Raymond's truck, a black-and-tan face peering over the rim, paws too big for the body, ears half-folded like question marks. Marcus had been a quiet kid then, tall for his age, living in a house where grief had already started to gather in the corners because his father had left two years earlier and his mother worked doubles at the hospital. Uncle Raymond set the box on the porch and said, "This one's got a serious face. Like yours. Call him whatever you want, but feed him and walk him and he'll make you less alone." Marcus named him Shadow because the puppy followed him from room to room as if attached by an invisible tether, and because in the evenings, when the light went long and gold across the yard, the dog's dark coat made him look like a moving piece of dusk.