Isaiah clipped his badge straighter. "I was interesting within bounds."
"That's what every interesting person says right before HR learns their name."
He took the next case. Then the next. The night stretched the way overnight shifts stretched: not in hours but in the density of other people's fear. At 3:40 a.m. he stood in the break room with coffee that tasted like burnt intention and texted his sister, Amina, because she kept hours as chaotic as his.
You up?
Amina: Always. Mama wants to know if Sunday dinner is a rumor or a plan.
Isaiah: Plan. I'll bring the salad she pretends she doesn't love.
Amina: Soft boy. Also you sound weird. Did a cute client happen.
Isaiah stared at the message. His thumbs hovered.
A puppy stepped on cereal. Owner thought he was dying. She covered her eyes. It was... a lot.
Amina: Deduce: you liked her.
Isaiah: Deduce: I like competent panic and people who show up.
Amina: That's a yes in lab coat.
He put the phone away when Gwen called his name for the dachshund's imaging. The rest of the shift became a sequence of bodies and voices and the particular tiredness that lived behind his eyes by dawn. When he finally clocked out, the rain had stopped. The city looked rinsed and unimpressed. In the staff lot he sat in his car for a full minute with the key in his hand and let himself remember Claire Maddox's laugh—the embarrassed one, the real one—and the way she had said Traitor like she was already in love with a dog who would betray her for anyone with gentle hands.
Excellent judgment, he had told her.
He meant the puppy.
He also, inconveniently, had not only meant the puppy.
At home—a one-bedroom with a kitchen that got good afternoon light and a couch that had survived veterinary school—he showered until the clinic smell loosened. He heated leftover jollof his mother had forced on him last weekend. He opened a journal he did not show anyone and wrote three lines, because his therapist had once said that naming the soft thing kept it from turning into a secret that ran the house.
Client. Funny. Not available to me as a story until she's not a client.
He underlined the last sentence once, hard, and slept.