Chapter Five
She remembered him. Exactly as he’d feared.
The realization rocked Trace a little, making him more uncomfortable than he’d already been. But then two men came barreling out of the house behind Molly, headed toward Meatball, who lay writhing in pain with a belly so swollen he looked like he could give birth to a giraffe any minute.
Trace cut them off as he realized they were going to pick up his dog. “Whoa, whoa. I can get him.” He tried to muscle past the taller one, who shot a quick glance at him.
“We’re professionals,” the man said. “We’ll get this dog into surgery while Molly and Dad start tests and prep the room. You wait.”
The two men moved in perfect concert, raising the seventy-pound dog as if he weighed nothing. But more than that, they lifted him with care and tenderness. That alone made Trace take a step back and let out a long, agonizing exhale.
This had been the right decision, after all.
Just then, a third guy joined them, and in the yellow light of the porch, Trace caught a quick glance of a man he recognized. Older, bigger, but that was definitely Garrett Kilcannon, who was in Trace’s high school class. Different worlds, but the same class.
Garrett added his arms to the human stretcher, easily taking hold of Meatball’s horrifically distended middle. With one word and a view ahead, he ordered the three of them to move in unison, the trio carrying Meatball away without so much as a glance his way.
Trace froze for a moment, still reeling from the panic of realizing Meatball was really, really sick. His instinct might be to beat them all away from his dog, but this wasn’t Huttonsville, and they weren’t hurting his boy. They were saving him.
He followed them, taking a quick scan of his surroundings. He’d never been to Waterford Farm, of course, but always imagined it was big, beautiful, and idyllic. Even in the dark, he knew he’d imagined correctly.
The other day, when he’d had that unexpected conversation with Dr. Kilcannon, he’d found out the family had transformed the property into some kind of big-deal canine facility, which was obvious from the huge training pen and sizable kennel. There were other structures scattered around the area, but the men carrying his dog followed a path around a fence and headed toward a small, well-lit building.
He could hear them talking to one another, taking the two steps up to a small, covered porch. On the clapboard, a hand-carved sign read Kilcannon Veterinarian.
The door opened, and he saw Molly inside hastily tying on a scrubs-style top as she ushered them in. She stepped aside to let them pass, and as they did, she peered into the darkness, a slight frown pulling at her features.
He wasn’t sure if she could see him or not, since he hung back in the shadows, but he could see her. She’d always been pretty, but grown-up Molly Kilcannon was nothing less than beautiful. She still had rich brown hair that gleamed with hints of red in the soft curls. Her eyes narrowed, and he was too far away to see, but he remembered them as constantly shifting from brown to green, like those mood rings his mother used to wear. Her face was heart-shaped and delicate, but she carried herself with confidence, with the security a girl who’d grown up with protective brothers and a big, fancy house would naturally have.
She’d made him laugh that night…and made him crazy.
Way too crazy. No wonder she’d come out of her house and looked at him like he was Satan himself, invading her world and dragging his dog…
His dog.
Meatball was all that mattered. Not some long-ago chilly night when he and Molly had sex in the back of a minivan. He stepped forward, into the light, seeing her whole body stiffen as he came into her view.
“Is he going to be okay?” he asked, not caring that he sounded pathetic. If anything happened to that dog, a piece of Trace would die, too. The only piece of him left after fourteen years in hell.
“I don’t know,” she said, her voice as icy as the January air around him. “We’ll do our best to help him.”
Minimally encouraged by that, he took a few steps closer, coming to the raised porch, looking up a foot or two to meet her gaze. Her eyes were more brown than green tonight. More mad or scared than…than the last time he looked into those eyes.
“Do you know what’s wrong?” he asked, aching for one word of reassurance that Meatball would survive this.
“With this? Everything.”
What the hell did that mean? “What’s going to happen to my dog?”
“Molly!” a man’s voice—Dr. Kilcannon, he presumed—bellowed into the night.
“You can wait in here,” she said. “This might take a while.”
With that, she turned and disappeared, leaving the door open and Trace standing with his jaw unhinged.
What might take a while? Surgery. Garrett said they were taking him into surgery. Would that save Meatball?
Letting out a grunt, he landed a booted foot on the wooden porch with more force than necessary. Inside looked like a typical warm and friendly reception area in a vet’s office. But he glanced to the porch at a small bench where he imagined patients—or their owners—waited on warmer days.
He considered sitting in the cold like the outsider he was. He hadn’t wanted to come here, not at all. Even after a candid conversation with a kindly vet who was the first person in town to make him feel welcome, Trace didn’t want to come to Waterford Farm.
And when that man mentioned that his daughter Molly was also a vet? That he thought maybe the dog had a little problem he called…lepto something? Even the worry of Meatball being sick wasn’t enough to get him here at first. The last person he wanted to see in Bitter Bark was, well, the last person he had seen in Bitter Bark.
And now Meatball’s life was in her hands. His question had been simple: What’s wrong? What was the diagnosis? What did it mean? Would Meatball live? What’s wrong?
Her answer baffled him. Everything.
A chilly wind blew down from the Blue Ridge Mountains, cutting through the thin coat he’d picked up at Goodwill the day he’d walked out of Huttonsville Correctional Center, a free man. Shit. Forget pride. He was freezing and needed to accept Molly’s invitation to wait inside, no matter how unenthusiastically it was issued.
He stepped into the golden glow of the undersized room, closing the door behind him, letting the warmth penetrate his bones. On one side was a desk surrounded by a granite-topped counter and on the other, a waiting area with two chairs and a table. Taking a seat, he stared at the closed door he assumed led to treatment rooms.
The only sound was a bubbling fish tank, where a lone betta swam from one side to the other, reminding him of some of the inmates pacing the exercise grounds.
Above that, the wall was covered with framed pictures of dogs—all Irish setters, he noticed right away—with some of the yellow-tinged photos looking like they dated back to the fifties. Almost all of them were posed in front of a yellow clapboard house, which he was pretty sure was the house he’d just left.
Trace let his head fall into his hands, closing his eyes and not moving as time ticked by. Waiting for time to move had been how he’d spent the better part of the last thirteen and a half years. Until the dogs. Until Meatball. Before that, prison had been exactly the way people described it, no different than the life lived by that fish.
Doing time. An action of complete inaction. He had no idea how long he sat there, eyes closed, waiting.
“GDV, is it?”
He looked up, not expecting the female voice, and even more surprised that he hadn’t heard the front door open.
A girl, a little slip of a thing with dark hair pulled severely off her face, stood in the doorway, massive eyes the color of oxidized copper staring at him.
“What is that?” he asked, suddenly remembering the letters Dr. Kilcannon had used when he yelled for help. “What is GDV?”
“What your dog has. At least that’s what one of my uncles said when he came back in.”
Trace frowned, sitting up straighter to look at the door that led to the offices. Had those men marched right by him while he sat here doing time?
“There’s a back way out,” the girl said, clearly a mind reader. “But Uncle Liam stayed with them to do the anesthesia and tubes.”
Anesthesia and tubes. On Meatball.
He shook off the worry and tried to place all these people, but the acronym was the loudest question in his head. “What does that mean? GDV?”
“Gastric dilatation and volvulus,” she said, the impossibly big words rolling out of her little mouth with ease. “Most people call it bloat.”
“Oh, bloat.” Trace stabbed his hand in his hair and dragged it back. “That doesn’t sound too bad. Like a bad stomachache.”
“Way worse,” she said. “It can be fatal.”
The word smacked him, making him blink at her. “Fatal?”
She gave an apologetic smile, revealing a flash of what looked like cobalt-colored braces. “Your dog’s in good hands, I promise.”
He nodded at that, not sure what else he could say to this little intruder. But she didn’t move from the doorway, her eyes locked on him as if he were some kind of weird animal in a zoo instead of a bereft man in a vet’s waiting room.
“He must have eaten something pretty serious,” she finally said. “Usually, they get into a whole bag of kibble or food for humans, like popcorn. He might have gulped air or even played too hard after eating a lot. It doesn’t take much for the stomach to flip.”
“Flip?” He tried to visualize that, and failed. “What does that mean?”
“The stomach gets all blown out of shape from food, and it loops around…” She made a twisting motion with her hands. “And flips.” She turned that same hand. “That’s when it blocks the flow of gas and stuff and can trap the spleen.”
Holy shit. That did sound serious.
She took a tentative step inside, eyeing him as if she were having some kind of internal battle over her curiosity and the need to get closer. “They want to throw up, but they can’t because the stomach is stretched.”
He stared at her, mesmerized by this child who knew so much about veterinarian medicine, but his mind kept going back over the last few hours as Meatball had gone downhill. “Yeah, yeah, you’re right. He ate a lot today. I got some dog food, and he loved it. Hadn’t eaten for a while…” His voice trailed off, realizing that sounded like he hadn’t been feeding his dog. “But not ’cause I was starving him.”
“Because he had lepto symptoms, right?”
Despite himself, he let out a dry laugh. She couldn’t have been eleven or twelve, but she was so serious. So strong. So…something he couldn’t pin down. Familiar? He wasn’t sure, but the effect was oddly comforting.
In fact, bathed in this sweet light of a welcoming lobby, resting on this leather chair, listening to a wisp of a girl explain complicated veterinarian issues, he felt…okay.
“Anyway,” she said. “That’s why his stomach got big. Was it huge?”
He held out his hands in front of his own belly like Santa Claus himself. “Massive.”
“Oh.” She took a few steps closer, a mix of pity and knowledge on her elfin features. “That’s not good. When the stomach expands, it can actually squish the lungs.”
He wasn’t even able to respond to that. Meatball’s lungs were being squished?
“Of course, it depends on how long he was sick,” she said quickly. “They might get in there before any of the, you know, squishing goes on.”
He didn’t know. He didn’t want to know. He just wanted Meatball to survive. “It went on for a few hours,” he said. “Is that bad?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I’m not a vet.”
“Coulda fooled me, kid.”
That made her smile again as she closed the door behind her, never taking her gaze off him.
After a second, she perched on the edge of the other chair as if she wanted to be there, but might need to jump up and run at any second.
“I’m Pru.”
He frowned, not sure what she said. “Umproo? Is that another dog disease?”
“No, but that’s funny. Umproo.” She giggled the word. “I meant my name is Prudence Kilcannon. Everyone calls me Pru.”
He tried to place her in what he knew was a big family. Kilcannon as her last name meant her father was one of the brothers, the ones who took Meatball away. Yeah, she said one was her uncle, so—
“What’s your name?”
There was a directness about her that was both refreshing and off-putting, and there was no way to ignore her. “Trace,” he said. “Trace Bancroft.”
She swallowed, that subtle inner strength shining through her eyes again as he could see she was weighing all the things she could say next, but wasn’t sure which to pick. “Well, welcome to Waterford, Mr. Bancroft.”
He almost smiled, and not because he couldn’t remember the last time anyone called him that. Lawyers and a judge, but that’s about it. “Thanks.”
“We’re the largest canine training and rescue facility in the state.” She sounded like a brochure, but such a cute one that he smiled.
“I heard. I met…” He tipped his head to the door.
“Dr. Kilcannon,” she supplied. “He’s my grandfather.”
As he suspected. “He’s a nice guy.”
“Oh, the nicest,” she said. “Everyone loves him.” Her eyes sparked with pride, giving him a weird kick of…what was that? Jealousy? Because he’d never had a grandfather everyone loved? Only a loony-bin mother and a father mired in shame.
“They call him the Dogfather.”
“The Dogfather?” he asked. “Like the Godfather?”
“Only we’re Irish,” she said with a huge grin that let him see the braces were actually clear, bound by bright blue rubber bands. “And he doesn’t, you know, put hits on people. But he does pull some strings to get people to do what he wants.”
“Yeah, I can see that.” He glanced at that office door that stayed firmly shut.
“I know you’re worried,” she said softly. “That’s why I came over here.”
He drew back at the unexpected kindness. “That wasn’t necessary.” But it was really, really sweet.
“I thought it was the right thing to do.”
“Thanks,” he muttered again, taking in the strange little creature. “You always do the right thing?”
“Always,” she answered without a millisecond of hesitation. “They don’t call me General Pru for nothing.”
That made him let out a wry laugh. “General Pru.”
With her little hands clasped like a high school principal, she leaned closer, all serious. “I keep this whole clan marching straight, you know?”
He laughed again, shaking his head. “How old are you?”
“I turned thirteen in August.”
“You seem older.” He frowned, inching back. “Or maybe younger.” What did he know about thirteen-year-olds anymore? He’d been on the inside since before this kid was born.
“Gramma Finnie says I’m small but mighty and wise beyond my years.”
“She’s right,” he said, realizing that for about two minutes, he actually hadn’t thought about Meatball. “Thanks for the distraction, Umproo.”
The nickname made her laugh again. “I know what it feels like when a dog is sick.” Reaching out her hand, she touched his jacket sleeve for one second, startling him. Contact with anyone was still so foreign. He looked at her narrow hand, so precious and perfect against his cheap, rough jacket. That was foreign, too. But, like everything else about her, comforting.
“I come over here a lot when people are waiting, so I—”
The office door popped open, followed by a loud gasp.
Trace whipped around to see Molly, her eyes wide in horror. “What are you doing?” she demanded.
“I’m only trying to make him feel better, Mom.”
It took a second to realize Molly was talking to Pru and not him. That she was…Mom? So Molly was this girl’s mother?
He shook off this news, more focused on the blood splattered on Molly’s scrubs than her personal life. “How’s Meatball?” he asked.
She glanced at him, then Pru, then him again. “Just a second,” she said stiffly, as if trying to center herself. “Pru, you need to go back to the house now. It’s getting late. Uncle Shane will drive you home. I’ll be home later, but it’s a school night.”
He stole a glimpse at the girl, catching the dismay in her eyes. “I was just…jeez, okay. No need to be weird, Mom.”
“Pru.”
“She wasn’t bothering me,” he said, feeling an inexplicable need to rise to her defense. But it wasn’t Pru who needed defending. He could see the look of disgust in Molly Kilcannon’s eyes as she took him in.
Although no one in Bitter Bark knew where he’d spent the fourteen years, since his mother moved away right after his sentencing in West Virginia, Trace had told her father. No doubt Daniel Kilcannon had filled her in, and she didn’t want her precious daughter anywhere near an ex-con.
“Bye…Mr. Bancroft.” Pru backed out, giving her mother one more look. “Hope Meatball’s okay.”
Molly let out the softest sigh, one that he couldn’t begin to interpret. Impatience skittered all over him as he turned back to her, anxious for news.
“Well?” he demanded.
She waited until the door closed tightly behind Pru. Which, if you asked him, was a pretty shitty bedside manner.
“We tried to release gas by puncturing his stomach with a needle, but when that didn’t work, we managed to get one X-ray and could see we had to operate.”
He cringed a little, knowing Meatball was a big baby with zero ability to handle pain. Clipping his nails sent him into a whining frenzy.
“His heart rate was two twenty with occasional VPCs.” She held up her hands at his look of confusion. “Premature heart contractions.”
He closed his eyes for a second, hating the sound of that. Of all of this.
“We had to do surgery.”
“Did you fix him?”
“My father and I did,” she said, holding up her hands as if to say those narrow fingers alone couldn’t have done a job like that. Only then did he see the blood rimmed around the arms of her surgical scrubs.
At what must have been a look of horror, she eased her arms back. “I didn’t take the time to change, sorry.”
Why would she apologize? She’d been that deep into Meatball’s guts. His heart turned over, a wave of affection and gratitude and admiration nearly knocking him over.
“We were able to get in there and flip his stomach back into proper position,” she told him.
“Oh, thank God.”
“But there was a problem with his spleen.”
And he fell down that roller coaster again. “What kind of problem?”
“We had to take most of it out. The GDV obstructed blood flow, and the organ died.”
“The organ.” The words came out like a groan. “But not the dog.”
She slowly shook her head. “He can survive nicely without a spleen. Meatball is in recovery now. Still coming off the anesthesia.”
He finally sighed, letting his head drop and his eyes close again. “I don’t know what to say.”
“It’s our job.”
He lifted his head, studying her, finally able to think about this woman who he’d once—one night only—had known so intimately. That girl had been so light and bright and wild and wonderful. With a dry wit and quick tongue. More like her daughter than…
“We’ll keep him overnight and under close observation for a few days,” she said.
“A few days?” Oh hell.
“He’ll need to be on fluids and pain meds. Also antibiotic injections, of course. There are some numbers we’ll run overnight to make sure all is well in there. We have to watch his stomach. It wasn’t the best color, and we need to monitor his vital signs very carefully and slowly introduce regular food back into his diet.”
So much to be done, he couldn’t even imagine how he’d pay for it. Or how that poor animal would endure it all.
“Okay,” he finally said. “Can I see him?”
She hesitated a quick second before nodding. “Yes, yes, of course. My father and brother are back there with him.” She gestured to the door as an invitation, but she didn’t move.
Despite her cool attitude, he wanted to thank her. Wanted to acknowledge this weirdness between them and somehow clear the air, especially if Meatball would be in her care for a few days.
But how?
“I had a nice chat with your daughter,” he said, hoping that would soften her a bit.
Instead, he could have sworn every drop of blood in her cheeks drained straight away.
“She knows an awful lot about vet medicine.”
Still pale, she nodded very slowly, and the complete silence threw him.
“She seems really smart and…looks like you.”
Jeez, how deep would she let him dig himself without even responding? A few awkward seconds ticked by, answering his question. Very deep.
“Anyway, thank you,” he managed, walking by her.
He pulled open the door, assuming he’d find his way since this ice queen wasn’t going to tell him a thing. He faced a small area with more doors and hallways and no clue where the hell he should go.
He turned as the reception area door was closing, in time to catch Molly Kilcannon drop her head into her hands and give in to a full-body shudder. Really? Now she shows emotion and compassion and a human side?
The door closed, and he stood there, stone-still, trying to understand…anything.
He picked a corridor and started walking to the light coming from one room, trying to shake off Molly, but man, she’d needled him with that attitude, that chilliness, and the fact that she acted like he was committing some kind of crime by talking to her daughter.
He stopped midstep. He swallowed against a dry throat. He felt his heart literally cease to beat for a second.
I turned thirteen in August.
Which meant she…had been conceived fourteen years ago in….
He squeezed his eyes shut and did some quick mental math.
November.
He reached for the nearest wall, suddenly needing support because the world tilted sideways and Trace Bancroft damn near fell off.