"There's no dispute. She was watching him while I was deployed. She shouldn't have brought him here. I'm taking him home."
Linda studied him for a long moment — the uniform, the dog tags, the eyes that had gone from cold to urgent to something almost like prayer. "Come with me," she said.
Kennel twelve was at the end of a concrete corridor. The barking was louder here, a chorus of need and confusion. Marcus walked behind Linda and felt every step in his boots. Then he saw him.
Shadow was thinner. His coat had lost some of its gloss. He lay on a thin pad with his head on his paws, and for a second he did not look up, as if he had decided that looking up never brought the right person. Then he lifted his head. His ears — those big, expressive ears — pricked. His dark eyes found Marcus through the chain-link, and the sound that came out of him was not a bark. It was a broken, rising cry, half whine and half something older than language.
"Hey, boy," Marcus said, and his voice broke on the second word. "Hey. It's me. I'm here."
Linda unlocked the kennel. Shadow surged forward, stiff in the hips the way older shepherds get, and put his front paws on Marcus's chest as if he weighed nothing, as if thirteen years and eight days in a shelter and the betrayal of being left could be compressed into one collision of fur and uniform fabric and the salt of a grown man's tears. Marcus buried his face in the scruff of Shadow's neck and smelled the shelter soap and underneath it, faintly, the smell of home.
"I got you," he whispered. "I got you. Nobody's taking you again."