Dangerous Memories

Andy was already at the elevator, standing with his arms folded and his weight set so precisely that if you squinted, you might think he was holding up the wall instead of the other way around. He didn’t move when Riley joined him in the corridor, her boots silent on the carpet, her hands buried so deep in her coat pockets it looked like she might be hiding something dangerous or maybe just trying to keep herself in one piece.

She said, “You know, most people just push the button and wait for the ding. You make it look like the elevator could sneak up on you.” Her voice hovered right at the edge of a laugh, the old Riley still visible through the new scar tissue. In another life, another time, she’d have poked him in the ribs or reached out and pressed the call button for him, if only to see how he’d flinch.

Andy didn’t look at her. “I like to be early.”

She let the silence stand for a beat, head cocked, one eyebrow up, like she was waiting for the rest of the joke to land. When it didn’t, she said, “Sure you don’t want to pace a little? Mark your territory before the next guy shows up?”

“That might take a while.” Andy kept his voice clean and neutral, neither rising to her challenge nor retreating from it, just letting the words fill the space and hang dead in the air.

She tried a different approach. “That’s a hell of a shirt you picked for tonight. It’s got, what, one button actually working and the rest just riding along for the look?”

He glanced down, tugged at a stray thread near the collar. “It’s the best I could do on short notice.”

She gave him a once-over, slow and obvious, then squinted as if trying to focus on a hidden flaw. “If you were going for ‘divorced dad picking up from the ex’s on a Sunday,’ you nailed it.”

He nodded, absorbing the hit and giving her nothing in return. He watched the digital display above the elevator like he was waiting for more than just a car, like he maybe expected a message from the universe.

Riley’s smile faded. She looked at her boots, then the carpet, then back at him. “Do you think the elevator even remembers how to get to the lobby anymore? I feel like it’s been years since anyone called it from this floor.”

“Maybe it’s union. Maybe it’s on a break,” Andy said, but he sounded tired, like someone trying to make a joke in a language he hadn’t used in years.

She let that one stand, but it didn’t bounce anywhere, didn’t spark a comeback. The old rhythm wasn’t coming back, not tonight.

He wasn’t even trying to hide it. She watched him, studied the way he held himself so steady, arms crossed and feet set, like he was bracing for impact. Like he wanted the next thing to hurt, if only to justify how much he already did.

She reached for the only lever left: “Andy,” she said, and this time it dropped all pretense, straight and simple, not loud but enough to cut through the ambient hum. “Are you okay?”

He took an extra second before answering. “No.” The word came out flat, without even the dignity of a wince behind it. Then: “Not since lunch ended. I haven’t been able to think about anything else since.”

Riley didn’t move. She didn’t touch him, didn’t even nod, just kept watching. The weight between them doubled, like the hallway had taken on extra gravity out of spite.

He seemed to find his own voice again, dredged up from somewhere lower in his chest. “I keep running it back, over and over. What I could have said differently at the table. What would have made a difference. I’ve got nothing. I had the one loophole, the one thing Claire had found to save Laura, and it’s a no-go.”

There was a pressure behind his words, like he wanted to force out every possible version of the story, if only to see one of them end differently.

Riley’s face didn’t change, but her hands—still jammed in her coat pockets—shifted. She wanted to do something with them, to take one out, maybe rest it on his arm, to say what she couldn’t out loud. Instead, she just squeezed her hands tighter in the lining, where he couldn’t see.

He looked over at her, finally, met her eyes head-on. “You said you weren’t going to leave your sisters behind.”

She nodded, once, almost mechanical. “Still true.”

He nodded, too, that same mechanic’s gesture, like admitting it out loud made it real, or at least gave it boundaries. “You were the only one at the table who didn’t sound like she was breaking apart.”

For a second, she seemed to lose her balance, but only in the thinnest way; her eyes flicked off his, fast, then snapped back with a squint like she was clearing up a hard math problem. “That’s not true,” she said, softer now, voice shrinking a notch. “I just—” She didn’t finish it.

He waited, open, not pushing but not moving on.

She took a breath that hitched, almost, then steadied. “I need you to understand why I said it, but—” She clipped off the rest, swallowed it. A dozen possible explanations flickered across her face and died before any of them made it to her lips.

He tried again, gentler: “Is it something you can tell me?”

She thought about that. The pause could have been five seconds or five minutes; it felt like forever. Then she said: “Doesn’t matter.” And right away, she pivoted, like if she let the conversation stay in that groove for another second, she’d never get it back. “I planned this date two days ago,” she said, fishing a battered paper from her coat pocket. “Had a whole itinerary lined up before the lunch. I was going to surprise you with it.” She kept the paper folded tight in her fist, refusing to unfold it or let him see what she’d written.

Andy tried to match her tone. “What changed?”

She looked at the paper, thumb on the crease. “I built a day for a version of you who hadn’t just sat at a table and listened to three women he loves tell him they’d rather die than let anyone pay for them.” She gave a brittle smile. “You still want the day, or should we call an audible?”

He said, “I still want the day. Exactly as planned.”

She searched his face, maybe for a lie. “You’re sure?”

“Yeah.”

She looked down at the paper, then up at him again, this time watching for something deeper. “Are you really sure?”

He didn’t flinch. “Yes. If you want it, I want it.”

That seemed to satisfy her, at least enough for the next step. She tucked the paper back into her pocket. “I’m not apologizing for what I said at lunch,” she told him. “And I’m not going to pretend I didn’t see what it did to you when I said it.”

He said, “I never expected an apology from you.” He meant it.

She stared at him for a second longer, then let it go. “How many stops do you think are on my list?” she asked, more playful now, though the edge was still there.

“I’d guess five,” Andy said, “maybe six, if you count detours.”

“Wrong,” she said, “I’m not telling you how many. You just have to follow instructions.”

“Does the order make sense?”

She shrugged. “It did this morning.”

Andy laughed, and this time it was real, a pulse of sound that came from somewhere below the effort and the ache. Riley heard it, noticed the difference, and neither of them said a word about it.

She pressed the button for the elevator. The doors opened with a sigh, and the car was empty, waiting for them.

Andy followed her in. She hit the DATE button.

The doors opened, not onto the lobby, but onto a street Andy didn’t recognize—slush-packed, gray, bare of the Hotel’s usual false-summer. He stepped out after her, hands in his pockets, and let her lead the way.

---

The street was Chicago suburbia in late January: snow packed gray along the curb, salt stains climbing the tires of every car in sight, nothing moving unless it absolutely had to. The elevator doors closed behind them with a hush, sealing off the humidity of the Hotel, and the cold registered against Andy's throat, sharp and immediate, without any of the sting it should have carried. Riley didn't react to it at all. She just stood on the sidewalk for a second, like she was waiting to see if the block would notice her before she moved.

Andy watched her, hands sunk deep in his coat pockets. She was different out here, even in the same black jeans and jacket. She belonged in the street the way a brick belonged in a wall.

They walked east, toward the lake. Riley didn’t set a pace, so Andy followed half a step behind, letting her decide the route with every shrug and head tilt. The cold was real enough to see, in the white of their breath and the crunch of packed snow, but neither of them felt it as anything to brace against. Riley's stride never shortened to huddle from the wind, and she didn't shiver, not once, the whole length of the block. She stopped after a block and pointed at a one-story brick bungalow, its roofline buried under a shell of snow, a blue recycling bin marooned at the base of the steps like a ship frozen in ice.

“That’s mine,” she said. “I know it doesn’t look like much. It’s even less on the inside.”

Andy stopped beside her, hands still sunk deep. “It looks solid,” he said. “Stubborn.”

She laughed, once. “That’s just the brick. They built it in the 1920s, before anyone figured out insulation. You could run the heat for a week and still see your own breath in the bedroom.” She didn’t look at him, didn’t seem to care if the joke landed or not. “The fence is new, though. I got tired of kids running through my tomatoes every summer.”

He considered the fence, the way it wrapped the whole front yard in a perfect rectangle of chain link, topped with the same green plastic every other yard on the block used to keep people from climbing it. “Did it work?”

“Sort of. They just started cutting through on the side instead.”

Andy almost asked if she was growing tomatoes out there, but he remembered what month it was, and let the joke die before it could embarrass itself. The wind kicked up and he rocked forward on his toes, trying to look at the place through her eyes. “It’s not too far from Warrenville.”

She nodded, hands jammed deeper than ever. “This isn’t where I started, but it’s where I landed. I like the quiet.” She pointed at a stack of mail on the porch, half-crushed against the door by the wind. “You see that? That’s two days of mail. I’ve been gone six weeks.” Her voice flattened. “Six weeks. And there’s only two days of mail.”

Andy watched her face, the way her eyes stayed fixed on that damp pile of envelopes.

“Time doesn’t work right,” she said, not looking at him. “Not for us.”

She shook her head slowly, still staring at the mail. “I don’t want to know what’s in there until I know whether I’m coming back for good.” She said it as if she’d already rehearsed the line, maybe on the way here, maybe a hundred times in her head.

He gestured at the street. “How did you pick this block?”

She looked up and down, then let her gaze settle on the house across the street. “It’s all right angles,” she said. “Nothing ever happens unless someone plans it. Nothing changes unless the city comes out and changes it for you.” She gave a weird, soft laugh. “It’s the first place I’ve ever lived where I could leave a coffee cup in the kitchen and come back a week later and find it exactly where I left it.”

He smiled, a real one this time. “That’s nice.”

She started walking again, this time tracing the edge of the fence instead of heading for the steps. “I can give you the block, if you want it,” she said. “All the way around. Every story is a rerun, but I like to tell them anyway.”

“I’d like that,” Andy said, and he meant it. He trailed her as she rounded the corner, kicking through the snow rut along the sidewalk.

She started pointing, low and deliberate, as if reciting a catalog. “That garage?” She jabbed a thumb at a cinderblock building with a sagging door and a basketball hoop bolted over it, backboard the color of old teeth. “Kid who lived there could dunk at thirteen. He used to run drills in the alley after midnight because his mom worked nights. Cops showed up twice, both times for noise, but never made him stop. They just watched, like it was TV.”

Andy tried to picture the kid, imagined some kind of local legend. “What happened to him?”

She shrugged. “Went to state on a full ride. Blew his knee out in the second week. Last I checked, he works at a car rental, tells everyone he’s in management.” She didn’t look at Andy when she said it, just kept walking. “Next door to that, that’s where the party house used to be. One time, they got the whole block to sign a petition to shut it down. Except for the woman who called the police on them, who later turned out to be running a weed farm in her basement. She’s still there, by the way. She switched to hydroponics during the pandemic.”

Andy laughed. “Classic Chicago.”

Riley grinned, but didn’t let it show for more than a second. “You could set your watch by her. Every Saturday, she comes out and smokes a cigarette at ten a.m. sharp. I used to watch her from my porch and try to guess if she’d ever realize she was the reason for half the neighborhood’s problems.”

They rounded back toward Riley’s house. The top step was just barely clear of ice, shoveled and salted with more care than the rest of the walk despite two days of absence. She took the step and sat, setting her elbows on her knees, hands still tight in her pockets. Andy sat beside her, the concrete cold enough to feel through both their jeans, though neither of them minded it.

She tilted her head back, watching the exhaust plumes drift from a neighbor’s vent pipe. “John used to sit right here,” she said, “in February, with no coat, because he said the cold woke him up better than coffee. I thought he was full of shit, but I’d still make him a cup every morning, just in case.” She squinted at the sky, memory flattening her voice. “He’d shovel our walk, then the walk for the woman two doors down. Four winters, never once told her he was the one doing it. She always left cookies for whoever did it. John hated sweets, but he’d eat every single one. He said it was a point of honor.”

Andy looked at her, but didn’t say anything.

She let the quiet settle, then went on, “Her name is Bev. She's two doors down, and she's exactly the kind of neighbor who notices a mail pile before the week's out and comes to check on you. I haven't figured out what I'm going to tell her.” She checked the time, tilting her wrist to catch the face of the watch: a chunky Seiko, way too big for her wrist, the band wound an extra loop and secured with what looked like a hair tie. She wore it on her right arm, the inside of her wrist. Andy noticed it, almost asked, but didn’t.

He looked at the house, then at her. “Do you want to go in?”

She thought about it, really considered it. “Yeah,” she said finally, but her voice was so flat it could have meant anything. “Might as well.” She dug for her keys, pulled them out, and held them in her fist so tight her knuckles went white. She stood up, stamped the snow from her boots, and walked to the front door. Andy followed, matching his steps to hers, and waited as she fit the key into the lock.

The door opened on a gust of freezer air. Inside, the house was silent and untouched, like the last two days—or five weeks—had only just blinked past. Andy could see his own breath—an honest-to-god white ghost of it, right there in the entryway—and for a second he wondered if the thermostat was even working. Riley didn’t shiver. She flicked on the lights, and each room blinked to life with that particular yellow only found in old bulbs, not a lamp in the house updated for the LED age.

Andy lingered at the threshold, absorbing the shape of it. The living room was small, almost cramped, but every inch was used: a battered corduroy sofa, a bookshelf sagging with secondhand paperbacks, a coffee table layered in magazines and mail, none of it newer than last summer. The whole house felt like the set of a play where the actors were called away in the middle of rehearsal and never made it back.

He moved forward, drawn to the dining nook and the table at its center, where three of the chairs were identical and the fourth was a different color, a different height, and at least ten years younger than the rest. He looked at Riley, about to ask, but she caught him first.

“Don’t judge the chair,” she said, running her thumb along the edge of the mismatched back. “John broke the old one trying to show off how many push-ups you could do in a plank position with it under your feet. Ordered this replacement off the internet, wrong size, wrong everything. Refused to send it back—said it was a teachable moment.” She rolled her eyes. “He used it for two years, just to prove his point.”

Andy grinned, the first real one of the night. “It’s a good story. Chair looks sturdy.”

Riley snorted. “That was our whole marriage. Wrong chair, make it work anyway.” She didn’t quite smile through it, but the words had warmth even as they cooled in the air.

Andy drifted next to the kitchen doorway, where a strip of blue painter’s tape was stuck halfway up the jamb, about even with his beltline. “What’s that?” he asked.

She followed his gaze, then looked away. “It was supposed to be a growth chart. John measured the exact spot before he left for Syria, said we’d start it when he got back.” Her voice thinned a little. “I just never took it down.”

He didn’t answer. There wasn’t a reply for that, not one that wouldn’t feel like an apology or worse, a fix.

She walked ahead, leaving the question hanging, and Andy understood the rhythm now—she’d show him the house, not linger, not turn it into a tour of wounds. He followed.

In the kitchen, a mug sat upside down in the drying rack, not even a dish towel under it. The rest of the counter was neat, clean, staged to look as if life here always ran this tidy. On the refrigerator, held by a single chunky magnet, was a wrinkled index card scrawled with a grocery list in a round, architectural hand. The ink was so faint in places that the paper seemed older than the house.

Andy tapped the edge of the card, then looked at Riley. “Yours?”

She shook her head. “John’s. He wrote it before he deployed. It’s been up there ever since.” She moved closer, staring at the list like she expected something to jump out. “I’ve taken it down exactly twice, and both times I put it back up before the day was out.”

He tried for gentle, found it. “Do you want to take it down tonight?”

She considered, weighing the answer, then shook her head. “No,” she said, not even a whisper. “Not tonight.” She didn’t look at him. She started toward the stairs, and Andy let the silence be what it was, trailing her up with careful steps.

On the landing, she stopped in front of the last door on the left. “I’m not—” she started, then stopped. She opened it. Inside, the room was empty except for a single crib, the kind with high slats and a powder-blue mattress, parked against a wall that was painted a pale, watery green. The other three walls were still primer white. The brushstrokes were visible in the unfinished paint, a hand’s width up from the baseboard and then stopping, like someone had lost the will to finish.

Riley stood just inside the threshold, not moving. “He was going to finish the room when he got home,” she said, her voice so even Andy almost didn’t catch the catch in it. “Said a kid shouldn’t have to sleep with three white walls. Green was supposed to be calming.”

Andy stepped in, looked at the room, then at her. “Was this for—” He let the question hang. JJ. It was for JJ.

She nodded, still not looking at him. “He never slept here,” she said, and the flatness was gone from her voice now, replaced with a kind of brittle glass. “Not even once. He was alive for twenty-three hours in a hospital twenty-two minutes from here, and I was there for almost all of it. I sat right next to that incubator and watched them work on him when his heart stopped. Watched the whole thing, start to finish. Nothing they tried worked.” Her voice didn't break, but something underneath it went very still. “They put him in my arms right after. Before anyone had cleaned him up, before any of that. He was still warm. That's the only ten minutes I got with him, out of twenty-three hours, and that was it.”

Andy started to reach for her, to say something, but Riley shook her head and turned, pulling the door closed behind them. “We have a schedule,” she said, her voice returning to its earlier register, hollow but functional. She moved down the stairs, not waiting for him to catch up. He lingered on the landing, looking at the strip of blue tape on the wall opposite the nursery door, felt his heart ache for Riley, then followed.

Back in the front hall, Riley paused only long enough to turn out the light behind them before heading outside, not glancing back even once. Andy followed, closing the door with a soft click.

The wind had died down, but it was still cold enough to sting. Riley didn’t comment on it. She led him around the side of the house to a detached garage, the kind that belonged more to the car than the owner. She yanked the door up on its track, the hinges screaming in protest. Inside, a battered sedan hunkered under a fitted cover, dust puffing into the cold with every step.

Riley said, “Battery’s probably dead,” but there was no lift to the words, no real care about whether it was or not. She pulled the cover off in one practiced motion, then popped the driver’s door and turned the key. The engine coughed, then caught, settling into a low, stubborn idle. Riley set her hand flat on the dashboard, not patting it, just resting there.

Andy stood at the hood, letting the moment breathe, then tried out a smile. “This could give Sam’s Rust Bucket a run for its money.”

Riley looked up, a laugh so sharp and so sudden it echoed in the small space. “You haven’t seen it in reverse. It’ll lurch you into the alley if you so much as breathe on the gas.”

He grinned, and the sound of her laughter made him feel, if not better, then at least awake again. For a second, the sadness lost its teeth. “You wanna drive or should I?” he asked.

She got in, slid the seat back with a practiced thud. “You’re not touching my car,” she said, and this time the line landed with a real, full smile, the first since the start of the date.

They pulled out onto the empty street, leaving the house behind, and the further they went, the lighter it felt—like every block put another layer between them and the cold inside.

---

They parked across the street from the bowling alley. The sign above the doors said BOWLIN in blocky, navy blue letters, the G missing since some pre-pandemic summer. Riley pointed at it through the windshield. “Been like that since I was a freshman,” she said. “I think it’d be weird if anyone fixed it now.”

Andy squinted at the sign, as if he could will the letter back into place. “Doesn’t that drive you crazy?”

She shook her head. “If it ever came back, I’d probably walk right past and never recognize the place.”

Inside, the alley had changed even less than the sign. The carpet was the same faded geometry as every bowling alley Andy had ever seen, with the gum-blackened edges and the persistent, underlying funk of decades-old nacho cheese. Six lanes, all open. The bartender doubled as the counter clerk and rental shoe wrangler, his name tag so worn it might as well have said BOB no matter what his real name was. There were three regulars already installed at the bar, elbows braced, eyes on the muted TV above the liquor rack.

Riley paid for two games in cash, grabbed two pairs of shoes, and walked straight to the scoring console without a word. “See that beast?” she said, tapping the battered CRT screen. “It’s a Brunswick Century Six. You can tell by the way it never remembers your score after the sixth frame.”

She didn’t bother typing their names, just set up the game and pulled a paper score sheet from the counter. “We’ll do it by hand,” she said, then dug a pencil from behind her ear and wrote ANDY and RILEY at the top of the column. Andy watched her write, the tiny and deliberate print, the way she underlined the Y in both names.

“Why bother with the paper?” he asked. “Isn’t the computer supposed to do it?”

She gave him a look, part disbelief, part pity. “Trust a computer built before you were born? Machine’s been broken since 2012. I’m not about to start forgiving it out of nostalgia.” She rolled a ball from the rack—black, eight pounds, already pitted like the moon. She handed Andy a red one, ten pounds, and said, “We’ll see if you can make it past frame six without divine intervention.”

He gripped the ball, feeling how off it was. “Is this rigged for you to win?”

“Not at all. I just bowled a lot as a kid.” She laced up her shoes, knotted them in double bows, then stood and picked up her ball. She stepped to the line, set her feet, drew back—and pulled up short, blinking. She looked down at herself, then at Andy, with the expression of someone who had just been betrayed by physics. “Okay,” she said. “New variable.” She shifted her weight, adjusted her stance, and muttered something under her breath that sounded like it had the word architecture in it. Andy kept his face neutral. She shot him a look anyway. “Don’t.”

She reset, rolled her shoulder once, and delivered a nearly perfect strike. The pins collapsed in a clean scatter, and the machine swept them away with a lazy hum. She turned, arms out, chin up.

Andy slow-clapped. “Architecture,” he said.

“Shut up and bowl.”

Andy matched her stride, but when he let go, the ball jumped the gutter before it even had a chance. “That’s tragic,” he said, watching the ball shudder to a stop in the pit. “Maybe we should ask the computer to intervene.”

Riley laughed, loud enough that one of the guys at the bar turned. “You’re supposed to aim for the center, not the edge.”

“Thanks for the tip. That’ll fix it.”

He lined up again, this time taking a breath and rolling slow. It still veered, this time barely clipping a pin. He shrugged. “Progress.”

Riley took her next shot, and this time Andy watched the mechanics of her, the way she set her wrist, the little bounce in her step at release. She didn’t throw hard, just straight and sure. When she knocked over nine, she scribbled it on the paper and made a show of circling it.

“Do you want a tutorial?” she asked.

“I want a handicap,” Andy said.

She set her ball down and came over. “Let me see your hand.” She grabbed his wrist, adjusted the way he held the ball, pressed her thumb into the ridge just above his palm. “There. Now don’t swing your arm out. Keep it lined up with your leg.”

Andy rolled his eyes but followed instructions. He managed three pins, a minor miracle. Riley clapped. “See? Teaching moment.”

He groaned. “Was it like this when you played with John?”

Riley smiled, softer. “He wouldn’t let me win. I respected that.”

They traded frames, Andy getting marginally better, Riley refusing to go easy. In the next lane over, a family of three set up bumper rails for a little kid who couldn’t have been older than five. Riley watched the kid for a frame, her expression unguarded. When the kid knocked down two pins and spun around with arms up like he’d won the championship, she grinned, then went right back to her own game.

She won the first game by seventy points, read the score out loud twice—“One fifty six to eighty six, just for the record”—then wrote the margin in a box at the bottom. “Are you sure you don’t want a rematch?”

Andy nodded. “Only if you promise to bowl left-handed.”

She actually tried it, and got a six her first frame. “It’s more democratic this way,” she said, then stuck her tongue out at him.

During the second game, Riley was more relaxed. She let Andy take his time, even cheered when he managed a spare. “That’s the spirit,” she said, “you might hit triple digits this time.”

He did, barely. She still doubled his score.

Between games, Riley took off one shoe and started re-lacing it, slow and methodical. “How are you actually doing?” she asked, not looking up. “Is it working?”

Andy blinked. “Is what working?”

“The part where you stop thinking about everything for five minutes.”

He was surprised at how true it was. “Yeah,” he said. “First hour all day my head wasn’t somewhere else.”

She finished the lacing, then looked up at him, something in her face actually softening. “Good,” she said. “That was the point.” When Andy smiled, too pleased with himself, Riley threw her shoe at him. He caught it, barely.

“Bested by footwear,” he said.

She grinned. “Don’t forget it.”

They bowled a third game, mostly for the hell of it, and when they finished, Riley folded the score sheet in half, then half again, then tucked it into her coat. “Keepsake,” she said, like it was the most natural thing.

On the drive back, Andy glanced over at her, trying to read her mood. “Where’s the next stop?” he asked.

Riley checked the time, then the street ahead. “Shelter,” she said. “Just to look.”

Andy raised an eyebrow. “That’s how they always start.”

She pointed a finger at him, mock-stern. “We are looking. That’s all.” He held up both hands in surrender, but he was already smiling, and this time she didn’t try to hide it.

---

The shelter was wedged between a vacant strip mall and a warehouse for auto parts, its windows painted over in white to keep anyone from gawking at the dogs inside. Riley parked right at the curb, killed the engine, and turned to Andy.

“We are not leaving with anything today,” she said, with a look that dared him to argue. “I mean it. If I start getting that face, you tell me to cut it out.”

Andy held up both hands, mock-solemn. “You have my word.”

She eyed him, decided he was good for it, then got out. The air in the parking lot was sharp with salt and the metallic echo of trucks rattling past on the road. They walked up together, and Riley stopped just short of the door, pausing for a second to steel herself. Then she pulled it open and let the noise hit them both.

It wasn’t loud, not exactly. But the smell of disinfectant and the thrum of a hundred minor barks built a wall of sound and scent that was instantly familiar to Andy, even though he’d never volunteered in a place like this. He trailed her into the main hallway, where plexiglass-fronted kennels stretched in two rows, each with a metal card clipped to the top.

Riley didn’t walk fast. She slowed at every third kennel, squinting at the cards. She didn’t talk, but her body language shifted. The old sharpness was gone, replaced by a softer, nearly hesitant curiosity.

At the sixth kennel in, they stopped. Inside, a senior pit mix lay curled on a blanket, head tucked between her paws, not so much as glancing at the two of them. The tag above her head said she was twelve, mostly blind, surrendered after her owner died.

Riley crouched down to the dog’s level, careful not to put her face too close to the glass. She set her hand flat against the chain-link but didn’t reach through. She just watched the dog for a minute, quiet, like she was reading some invisible text on the side of the animal. Andy crouched beside her.

“She doesn’t even notice us,” he said.

“Sure she does,” Riley said. “She’s ignoring us on purpose.” A tiny smile played at her lips. “She’s got dignity.”

Andy looked at her, at the dog, then at her again. “You want to take her home, don’t you?”

Riley shook her head, but didn’t look away from the pit. “That one needs a grandma, not me. She’d see right through my act.”

They walked on. Two huskies filled the next kennel over, both pressed against the glass, tails wagging with synchronized energy. The card said they were a bonded pair, surrendered together, had to go as a set or not at all.

Riley read the card twice, lips moving on the second pass. “That’s brutal,” she said. “Who could keep up with these two?”

“Someone with a sled?” Andy offered.

Riley grinned. “Or a death wish.” She watched them for a second more, then moved on, but not before giving the glass an approving nod.

A terrier in the next cage barked without pause for the entire length of the hallway. Andy winced, and said, “That’s a lot of spirit for a dog smaller than my old backpack.”

“Those are the ones that will run your household,” Riley said, half-laughing. “If you give an inch, they’ll unionize on you.”

As they continued, Andy noticed Riley always turned her body sideways at the kennels, kept her hands down at her sides, and never put her fingers through the links. He waited until they reached the end of the row, then asked, “Where’d you learn that? The etiquette thing.”

She blinked, and for a moment looked embarrassed. “I volunteered at a place almost exactly like this in high school. They showed us how to approach—sideways, never head-on, and never let your hands get close unless you know the dog. Cuts down on stress for everyone.” She shrugged. “It just stuck.”

“Did you ever want to do it, you know, as a job?” Andy asked.

She stopped, weighing the answer. “I thought about a lot of things when I was seventeen,” she said, and this time it wasn’t a dodge. “Didn’t stick with any of them long enough to make it count.”

Andy nodded. “That happens.”

Riley let the thought hang, then started toward the front desk. A staff member, a woman in a polo shirt and a pixie cut, intercepted them near the door. “Anything you want to see out in the yard?”

Riley shook her head. “No thanks. We’re just looking today.” She glanced over her shoulder, back down the row they’d just walked, and for a second Andy thought she might change her mind.

But she didn’t. She just watched the dogs a second longer, then stepped out into the cold with Andy behind her, the sounds of the shelter receding into the closed door.

---

They almost made it to the parking lot before Riley stopped, mid-stride, her head cocked just so. Andy followed her line of sight back to a kennel they’d breezed past on the way in. This one was at the far end, partly in shadow. Inside stood a golden retriever, maybe two years old, her fur so bright it made the whole run look artificially lit.

She didn’t bark, not like the others. She just walked to the gate, tail wagging, and set one enormous paw flat against the mesh. She held Riley’s gaze, eyes liquid, patient, the way only retrievers could manage.

Riley stared, then started walking again, but Andy could see the hesitation, the crack in her rhythm.

He caught up. “You okay?”

Riley stopped. “I just—” She shook her head. “I want to see her in the yard. Just for a minute.” Her voice was even, but something under it vibrated.

Andy nodded. “I’ll ask.”

He flagged down the staff member from earlier, and in less than two minutes they had the retriever leashed and out the side door into the yard. The snow out here was thin, trampled down by months of paws, but the cold didn't reach either of them the way it should have, not through gloves or coat or bare skin.

The dog crossed the yard in a straight line, as if she’d rehearsed it, and leaned her whole body into Riley’s legs. Riley knelt, not even trying to brush the snow from her jeans, and when the dog pushed her head into Riley’s lap, she just wrapped her arms around it and held on.

Neither of them said anything for a minute. The dog’s tail swept slow, then stopped, then started again.

The staffer watched, arms crossed, then offered the folder. “Her name’s Meatball,” she said. “She’s had two returns, both because the landlords changed their minds. No issues, not even a warning on her chart.” She smiled, a little sad. “She just… gets left behind.”

Riley ran her hands over the dog’s ears, slow and deliberate. “That’s not fair,” she said, and her voice was so flat that Andy thought she might be angry.

He crouched next to her. “You said we aren’t getting any, right?”

Riley opened her mouth, then shut it. “Yeah,” she said. “I can't.” She kept her hands on the retriever's neck, not letting go. “We're just looking. That was the rule.”

“You made the rule,” Andy said. “I'm just enforcing it.”

“I'm aware.” She didn't stop petting the dog. “Doesn't mean I have to like it right now.”

The staffer, still hovering, said gently that there was no pressure at all, they could take their time.

“See,” Andy said. “Take your time. Get up. We'll go get dinner.”

Riley didn't get up. “How long does the paperwork take?”

“Riley.”

“I'm not doing anything. I'm asking a hypothetical question.”

“About thirty minutes,” the staffer said. “Hypothetically.”

“You said thirty seconds ago you weren't set up for this,” Andy said.

“I know what I said.” Riley stood, and the dog stood with her, already leaning into her leg like the decision had been made somewhere he hadn't been consulted. “I'm allowed to be inconsistent. It's been a hard day.”

“That's exactly why I don't think—”

“Andy.” She said his name the way you say it to end an argument, not start one. “I need you to not talk me out of this for the next five minutes. After that you can talk me out of it all you want.”

He didn't have an answer for that. She was already walking toward the front desk.

By the time he caught up, she had a pen in her hand and a stack of forms in front of her that he didn't remember anyone bringing over. She filled in her name, then stopped, pen hovering. “What's today's date,” she said, to no one in particular, and someone told her, and she wrote it down like it belonged to somebody else's life.

“Riley.”

“Don't,” she said, not looking up. “If you say my name like that one more time I'm going to start crying in a strip-mall shelter, and I really don't want to do that.”

He didn't say her name again. He signed where she pointed and didn't argue with a single line of it. When it was done, she stared at the finished paperwork like she wasn't sure how it had gotten filled out. “I have no idea what just happened,” she said.

“I tried to stop you.”

“You did not.”

“I tried for a whole thirty seconds.”

She almost laughed. “Yeah. Thanks for that.” She looked down at the dog, already leashed, already leaning into her leg like she'd been there for years instead of minutes. “I have no idea what I'm doing.”

“Neither do I,” Andy said. “I don't think that's disqualifying.”

The staffer handed over a bag of food, a collar, and a length of pink leash. Riley made a face at the color and didn't ask for a different one.

On the drive home, the dog rode in the back, head resting on the center console between them. Riley glanced back at her every thirty seconds, like she was checking she hadn't imagined the whole thing.

“We'll have to find somewhere for her at the Hotel before dinner,” Riley said. “Steakhouses aren't dog friendly, and I refuse to leave her in the car.”

“I want it on record that I said no,” Andy said.

“Noted. Ignored. On the record.” She was smiling when she said it, and this time it was the easiest thing in the world.

---

The elevator ride back to the Hotel was short, but the golden retriever made it memorable by shifting her weight every fifteen seconds, tail thumping against the steel, fur sticking to both Riley and Andy in equal measure. Riley cradled the dog the whole way, arms locked like she was afraid the car might drop out from under them if she let go.

When the doors opened, they stepped straight into the main corridor, the retriever’s head up, eyes bright, scanning for threats or friends or treats. The scent of food led them to the Banquet Hall, where Dawn sat at one of the big tables, reading a book and picking at a plate of toast and fruit.

Riley set the retriever down and the dog immediately pressed her nose into Dawn’s thigh. Dawn glanced down, did a double-take, then looked up at Riley. “Who’s this?”

Riley dusted her arms off, then answered, “Meatball. She’s new.” She looked around, spotted Andy, and said, “We’re only here for a few minutes—just looking for Chloe. Is she in the kitchen?”

Dawn opened her mouth to answer, then stopped mid-sentence as she processed the information again. “She’s in the kitchen, yeah. But wait—whose dog is this?”

Riley gave the five-sentence version: “Shelter. This afternoon. No plan. Needed somewhere for her to stay for a few hours. Can you cover until I get back?”

Dawn nodded, then asked, “Is she good with people?” and “Does she have food allergies?” Riley answered yes to the first and no to the second. “She’s a vacuum with legs,” Riley said, “She’ll eat anything, including drywall. Ask me how I know.”

Dawn grinned, got down to one knee, and scratched Meatball behind the ears. “She seems sweet.” She looked up at Andy, eyebrows raised. “Did you know this was happening?”

Andy shook his head. “I was present at the event, but I don’t think anyone planned it.”

“Isn’t that how it always goes?” Dawn said, standing and ruffling the retriever’s fur.

They started for the kitchen but only made it two steps before something blue and low to the ground rounded the corner ahead of them, moving at an improbable speed for its shape. Samson Drei—Andy’s immortal corgi—locked onto the retriever with laser focus, paws splaying out on the polished floor as he tried to stop and then circled her in a wide, cautious arc.

Meatball watched him, tail waving slow and steady, the picture of tolerance. Samson Drei made two full circuits before closing in, chest puffed, ears back, then gave a single high-pitched bark.

Meatball responded by lowering her whole front end to the floor, butt in the air, tongue lolling sideways, and waited. The corgi barked again, less certain, and after a moment Meatball rolled onto her side, exposing her belly and putting her head flat on the tile—her eye level now exactly matched to Samson’s.

Riley laughed, sharp and bright, the sound echoing down the corridor. Andy looked over, and she caught his eye, shrugged. “She’s better at this than I am.”

He crouched to pet them both, and Samson Drei immediately abandoned the retriever to butt Andy’s hand, tail wagging so hard his whole body wobbled. Meatball just waited, still belly-up, until Andy reached over to scratch her too. She rolled back upright and scooted forward, pressing her head into his thigh, a low, contented woof humming in her chest.

Riley watched them, arms folded, still grinning. “You see the size difference? She could carry him like a purse.”

Andy said, “I think Samson would actually enjoy that.”

They let the moment run, the two dogs sniffing, circling, negotiating the rules of engagement. Riley didn’t rush it; she just watched, and Andy noticed that—for the first time since the date started—she was completely at ease, not performing, not holding anything back.

Chloe came out of the kitchen, drawn by the noise. She saw the two dogs, looked at Riley, and said, “New friend?”

Riley said, “Her name’s Meatball. Can you take her for a few hours?”

Chloe nodded, not even a pause. She set down the mug she was carrying and crouched to introduce herself, palm up, gentle and careful. Meatball sniffed her, then leaned into Chloe’s touch, tail wagging at a perfect medium speed.

Chloe looked up, smiled. “She’s adorable. Where’d she come from?”

Riley gave the same four-sentence summary she’d given Dawn. Chloe just nodded, already reaching for the leash.

Chloe asked, “Is she housebroken?”

Riley said, “She’s got more self-control than I do. You’ll be fine.”

Chloe grinned. “What a name, though. Meatball?”

Riley made a face. “Don’t start. I’m already regretting it.”

Chloe said, “She’ll grow into it.”

Before they left, Riley knelt down beside Meatball, got her face close, and whispered something into the retriever’s ear. Andy didn’t catch it, but the dog wagged faster, then licked Riley once on the cheek.

Andy said, “What did you say to her?”

Riley stood up, straightened her jacket. “That’s between us,” she said, but there was no edge to it.

They headed back toward the elevator, and Samson Drei—having completed all business—trotted off after Chloe and the other dog instead of following Andy. Andy watched the little blue blur recede, then said, “That was quick. Replaced already.”

Riley smirked. “You had it coming. Dogs have priorities.”

Andy pressed the call button, hands in his pockets, and when the elevator doors opened, he waited for Riley to step in first. She did, then looked back at him. “You’re not going to make a joke about the dog being a metaphor, are you?” she asked.

He thought about it, then shook his head. “No,” he said, and meant it. She smiled, small and satisfied, and let the doors close behind them.

---

Author's Note: Don't forget to send in your questions for the cast! Deadline is August 23: https://forms.gle/8PFdtX7kNDKhhHus7