Chapter 4

Nora's POV

By the end of day two with Ghost I had told him things I had not said out loud since the trial and I was not going to examine what that meant about my current mental state.

He had settled into the apartment like he had a blueprint of it. He knew where I sat in the evenings and where I put my coffee and which side of the bed I slept on and he had figured all of that out in under a day without me telling him any of it. He lay under the kitchen table while I worked with his chin on my feet and I let him stay because moving him felt like moving something that was exactly where it was supposed to be.

I told myself that was just what service dogs did. That was the training. That was why they existed.

I also told myself his eyes were not unusual. That amber was a normal color for a wolf hybrid. That the way he looked at me sometimes, patient and direct and too knowing for an animal, was just how wolves looked and I was projecting.

I was possibly projecting.

On the second afternoon I needed coffee and had run out and I left Ghost in the apartment with the radio on because Dr. Reyes had said familiar background noise helped, and I walked to the Millbrook Grind.

It was quiet inside. One person at a table with a laptop. The barista was making something and turned when I came in and I felt the same thing I had felt the first time I came in here, that low shift, something in me recognizing something in him before my brain had caught up.

He said flat white before I ordered.

I said how do you know that.

He said you have been in twice. He said it simply, like it was not strange to remember a coffee order from two visits, and turned to make it and I stood at the counter and looked at the back of his head and the way he moved through the small space with that easy certainty and thought: I know you from somewhere. Not the café. Somewhere else.

I took the coffee to the window table and drank it and watched him work and the feeling did not go away.

The amber eyes. The way he went still when he listened. The way he made coffee exactly right without being told.

I walked home fast.

Ghost was at the door when I came in and he looked at me and I crouched down in front of him and looked at him properly and thought about amber and warmth and the specific quality of attention that felt like being truly seen and then I stood up and said out loud to the empty apartment: you are a dog.

Ghost looked at me.

I said it again less certainly.

He turned and went to the window and stood there with his ears forward and I went to stand beside him and looked out at the street.

The dark car was back. Different spot, same plate. Four days now, moving overnight but never leaving.

Ghost made a sound low in his chest.

I know, I said. I see it.

My phone buzzed. Not a call. A text from the unknown number again.

This one said: we know about the dog.

I stood at the window with my phone in my hand and Ghost pressed against my legs and I thought about that photograph on my mat two days ago and the text message when I arrived and the case being reopened and the men who had been patient for eighteen months and were not being patient anymore.

They knew about the dog.

Which meant they had been watching long enough to see the placement happen.

Which meant they were closer than I thought.

Ghost growled.

Not at the window this time. At the front door.