"You should sleep. Decisions made at midnight after eight months of deployment and finding your dog in a kill-adjacent kennel are not always your best work."
He almost smiled. "Kill-adjacent."
"Linda at the shelter is a friend of a friend. I know how those boards work. You got lucky on the timing, Marcus. Another day..." She did not finish. She did not need to.
Shadow snored softly in the corner. Marcus closed his eyes and listened to that sound the way some people listen to rain.
Before sleep finally took him, Marcus let his mind drift further back than the apartment, further back than the deployment, to the years when Shadow was young and the world felt simpler even when it was not. He remembered training him in the backyard with pieces of chicken, the click of a cheap clicker, Denise laughing from the porch because the puppy kept bringing the wrong toy. He remembered the first thunderstorm, Shadow trembling under the kitchen table, Marcus crawling under there too with a flashlight and a comic book until the rain stopped. He remembered driving to basic training with Shadow's fur still on his civilian clothes, and the way he had pressed his face into that fur in Denise's driveway like a man stocking up on a necessary element.
He remembered introducing Jasmine to Shadow at a cookout, watching her offer the back of her hand, watching Shadow decide. He remembered the night Jasmine said she loved him for the first time, and Shadow had barked at a raccoon in the alley as if annotating the moment. He remembered packing the duffel eight months ago, kneeling to take Shadow's face in his hands, saying, "Watch her for me. She's watching you for me. That's the deal." He had believed in the deal. Believing in the deal was what made the empty bed unbearable.
Denise's clock ticked. Somewhere a siren passed and faded. Marcus thought about the sentence he had thrown like a grenade — If that dog is gone… we are gone — and wondered whether he would have been able to live inside it if Linda had come back from the kennels with different news. He did not know. He was glad, with a gratitude that felt almost religious, that he did not have to know.