Marigold lay beside my chair, her head resting on my boot, her breathing slow and steady in a way that made it almost possible to believe everything would be fine if I just stayed still enough not to disturb whatever fragile balance existed in that room.
That was when the doors burst open.
The man who stumbled in looked like he had come straight from a life that had already taken too much from him. His jacket was thin for the season, his hair uneven like it had been cut months ago and then forgotten, and in his arms was a small terrier wrapped in a worn blanket that had clearly been washed too many times to hold any real warmth.
“Please,” he said, not loudly, not dramatically, but with a kind of urgency that didn’t need volume to be understood. “Please help him first.”
The dog wasn’t barking.
It wasn’t even whining.
It was making a sound I had never heard before, something caught between silence and struggle, like its body was trying to do something it no longer knew how to do.
