"Together," Claire said, because her arms had started to shake and she did not want them to be the reason Nash felt unsafe.
They unwrapped the fleece. Nash blinked up at the lights, golden fur flattened in damp swirls, tiny pads flexing against stainless steel. Isaiah's hands moved with the calm of someone who had done this a thousand times and still treated the thousand-and-first as if it mattered. Ears. Eyes. Mouth. Belly. Limbs. The stethoscope's blue tubing brushed Claire's wrist once, cool, and she almost apologized for existing in the same air.
"Good news," Isaiah said after a stretch of quiet that felt longer than it was. He looked up. Met her eyes. "He's completely fine."
Claire stared. "Then why did he scream like he was dying?"
Isaiah's professional face held for half a second. Then something warmer slid underneath it, playful without being cruel. "He stepped on a piece of cereal."
The sentence landed in Claire's chest like a dropped plate.
She covered her eyes with both hands. Shame, finally, with all the oxygen it needed. "I brought him to an emergency clinic for cereal?"
"Very dangerous cereal," Isaiah said, deadpan enough that it took her a beat.
Claire laughed—short, helpless, the sound of a person discovering she was still capable of laughter while mortified. "You're making fun of me."
"Only professionally."
He scooped Nash up with practiced ease. The puppy, traitor to every bond Claire thought they had formed in eight weeks of sleepless negotiation, stretched toward Isaiah's face and licked the tip of his nose.
Claire's hands dropped. "Traitor."
Isaiah held the puppy a little closer. His eyes found Claire's again—intense, soft, the kind of eye contact that made a fluorescent room feel smaller. "He has excellent judgment."
The flirtation sat between them like a third animal: warm, alive, not yet named. Isaiah's smile arrived fully then, and Claire felt her ears go hot under the messy bun.
"Okay," she said, because she needed a word that could hold the floor. "So—discharge? I pay for the privilege of learning my dog is a drama major?"
"Something like that." Isaiah set Nash back into the fleece with care, as if the cereal incident had earned the puppy a ceremony. "We'll send you home with a note. Keep an eye on him tonight. If anything changes—real limping, vomiting, lethargy that isn't just exhausted-puppy sleep—you come back. But Claire?" He said her name like he had practiced it. "He's okay. You did the right thing bringing him in when you didn't know."
"Even for cereal."
"Especially for cereal," he said. "The scream is the data. You don't get to grade the data until after."
She paid at the desk under lights that made everyone look slightly guilty. The tech who printed her paperwork smiled the smile of someone who had seen worse and kinder emergencies. Outside, rain still sheeted the windows. Claire rewrapped Nash, pushed through the doors, and stood under the clinic awning long enough to breathe.
Her phone buzzed again.