As I unlocked the door to my houseboat, I heard it. At first, it sounded like a duck paddling, but then I heard something else—a panting, or a gasping. For a second, it died down. It didn’t worry me, really, because the docks were full of weird noises, and boats were noisy as fuck. But as I turned the deadbolt, the sound got louder and more frantic. Whatever it was, it didn’t sound good, and it sure as hell didn’t sound like a duck. I let my work belt slide off my shoulder onto the deck and looked down in the water, gripping the taffrail. There in the shadows, gasping, paddling, and panicking, I saw something small and wet and terrified.

Holy fuck. It was a dog. A tiny, drowning dog.

Fully clothed, boots on, I jumped into the water off the sternside. I plunged in deep, submerged in a world of shadowy, barnacle-crusted dock pilings and chains holding anchors far below. Holding my breath and looking up toward the sunshine, through the bubbles that came down with me, I saw it. No bigger than a chicken, and kicking hard. I breaststroked toward the dog, aiming to come up right below it, but the salt water stung my eyes, and I closed them out of reflex. When I surfaced, it had gotten a few feet away. It was just a tiny thing, soaking wet, sucking in terrified breaths. It doggy-paddled in circles, slipping down into the water so that only its nose was above the surface. I did one strong breaststroke, but it was in full flight-or-fight mode, absolutely fucking petrified, and it paddled away from me, slipping out of my grasp. With one more big stroke, I had it, and I scooped it up into my arms to hold it up out of the water, the way people do when they hold babies in the air. I saw it was a girl, her tummy soft and much less furry than the rest of her. Her big black eyes bugged out for an instant, and then…

She went limp in my hands. Lifeless, with her feet dangling down, her tongue hanging out. Her eyes were closed. On my palm, I couldn’t feel a heartbeat where I was sure there should have been one thrumming along.

Fuck. Fuck.

I gave her a shake, but she dangled like a rag doll.

I held her out of the water, keeping her in a tight bicep curl over my shoulder. Carefully, I maneuvered under the jetty that led to my boat. I got a toehold on the old dock ladder, rusty and unsteady. Using one hand to climb up, and using both boots like climbing picks, I emerged from my boat’s shadow and out into the sunshine of the dock. I laid her down on her back, supporting her lifeless body. With every passing millisecond, my heart fucking broke more and more. I could not let this happen. I could not let her die. I pulled myself up all the way and knelt beside her. She was flat on her back, with no signs of life at all. Her arms were limp, and her paws dripped onto the dry wood beneath her. Still, her tongue hung out. Still, her eyes were shut. Still, she wasn’t breathing.

Somewhere, buried deep in my memory, I remembered learning the basics of canine CPR. I felt like maybe it was in my lifeguard class when I was in high school, but I didn’t fucking know and it didn’t fucking matter. All I knew was I had to do something—and fast. So I did. I wrapped my fingers around her tiny muzzle and brought my lips to her leathery nose. I blew gently, and as I did, I felt her chest swell up. I held my own breath and prayed for anything, any sign of life, but there was nothing. Lightly, with the tips of my fingers, I did compressions on her soaking wet fur. One. Two. Three. And then I did another breath. One. Two. Three.

“Come on, little lady,” I whispered and rolled her onto her side. I gave her a few pats, firm but not too hard. She was absolutely tiny—from scruff to tail, hardly bigger than the span of my hand. I rolled her over onto her back again and gave her one more breath, all the while going through the paces of what the fuck to do if this didn’t work. I had no goddamned idea whatsoever where the vet was. Did we even have a vet? Would she survive that long? What the fuck was I going to do?

But as I started the next set of compressions, she coughed. She actually coughed, like a tiny person, a gasping, choking hack, accompanied by a few mouthfuls of water spilling out onto the wood planks.

Holy shit.

I froze with my hands just above her tiny body. Her strange, buggy eyes opened up, and she started panting hard.

“Hey, hey!” I scooped her up in my arms, cradling her to my chest. I could tell by the way she was so limp against me that she was exhausted. Holding her close to my body, to keep her warm and safe, I scratched the fur at the back of her neck, and her tail started to wag. But she was also shivering hard, and I didn’t like that one bit.

Carrying her like a baby, her chin over my shoulder, her wet chest against my soaking T-shirt, I brought her down the jetty. I noticed that when I got close to the edge of the docks, she’d lean away, like she was terrified. But I kept her close and safe and brought her onto the lower deck of my place. I grabbed a towel from the bathroom and wrapped her up like a burrito, making sure she could still see out from the opening at the top. Though I loved them, I actually knew fuck-all about dogs. She seemed okay. She didn’t seem to be hurt. In fact, her breathing was getting much more regular, and her eyes were starting to close with what I imagined was the pure relief of not having to tread for dear life anymore. For a moment, I just sat there and stared at her. I touched the soft skin of her ears, and it reminded me a plant Rosie had in the garden—lamb’s ear, I remembered her telling me. I adjusted the towel so it was wrapped around the dog just right. Water dripped off my pants onto the floor of my boat, but I didn’t give a shit if I soaked the rug and warped the floorboards. In my arms, the little lady was sound asleep. She seemed fine…

But how the fuck would I know for sure?

Still holding her close to me, now swaddled up like a newborn and snoring softly, I grabbed my tool bag from the outside deck. By the fucking grace of God, I’d put my phone there and not in my pants. Using one thumb, I searched for vets in Truelove. I found myself rocking her like a baby, as natural as if I’d been waiting all these years to do it. Automatically, my thumb opened up the chat window with Rosie. The last handful of messages were me asking her the dimensions of this door or that window, and her replying with precise, clear answers, down to the eighth of an inch.

She was fucking perfect. It just took me having to see her buck naked to realize it.

Yet, while I knew I should just fucking man up and text her to ask her what to do about this tiny pipsqueak of an animal in my arms, I also felt suddenly…weird about it. Nothing had happened. It was only a glimpse.

Yeah. A glimpse. A glimpse that changed the whole ball game. A home run that turns around the whole goddamned season.

And I didn’t want to bug her. She was probably working. I hated to bug her when she was working. No, I could handle this without her. Totally. Me and Google had this shit covered. I flipped back to my browser and scrolled through the results.

There was a vet in Trulove. The logo was a dog’s head in profile and a cat’s in silhouette inside it. As soon as I saw that image, I remembered where it was. While the phone rang in my ear, I adjusted the towel around her, folding it at the top to make sure she had plenty of room to move her head.

“Truelove Emergency Animal Hospital. Doris speaking.”

“Hey there, Doris,” I said. “I rescued a dog from drowning, and I want to make sure she’s okay.”

“Well, aren’t you a sweetheart,” said Doris. “What kind is it?”

What kind? I barely knew my dachshunds—was that the wiener dog?—from my Dobermans. As for what this little thing was…I studied her and unswaddled her a bit. “Little. Funny toes.” As if she knew I was talking about her, her eyes popped open. She stared at me hard.

“Hi,” I whispered.

Her ears went down like Yoda’s. Then her eyes fluttered, and she conked out again.

“Supercute. Really little,” I told Doris in a whisper.

“How little?”

I bounced her gently. She felt like my niece when she was only a day old, or even smaller. “Really little. But she doesn’t have a collar or anything. I don’t know how she ended up in the water.”

“We get a few jumpers every year,” Doris said, like it was no big deal, dogs in the Atlantic Goddamned Ocean. “People on yachts, stuff like that, you know? Dog’ll take a fancy to a fly, and splash!”

Oh Christ. The very idea made me fucking sick. Somewhere out there, some family on a boat watched this little creature take a nose dive off the stern? Somewhere out there, some girl in messy pigtails was sobbing at the water? Jesus. One near-tragedy at a time was all I could handle. “I think she’s fine, but I don’t…” I looked down at her. Was her tongue supposed to hang out like that? Was that normal? I had no fucking idea. Her mishmash of cuteness confused me totally. Even worse, what if she had water in her lungs? What if she’d hurt herself, and I couldn’t tell? What if… Fuck, I didn’t know. What if I’d done so far wasn’t enough? “Can I bring her in?”

Doris made a smacking sound like she’d just put on some lipstick. “Come on in, hon. We’ll be waiting.”

* * *

I felt like an expectant dad as I sat in my soaking wet clothes in the waiting room, staring at an oddly friendly flea-and-tick poster on the cinderblock wall. A periodic drip of water from my work pants splattered on the linoleum underneath me, and I rocked my boot back and forth, the sole squelching. I thought about texting Rosie again, but I didn’t know what to fucking say, and I’d left my phone in the truck so it didn’t get soaked in my pants. But now the drama was over, and she’d be pissed she missed it. Damned if I did, damned if I didn’t. But one thing was getting pretty fucking clear: Since the day we dug up the carrots, I’d been hers.

“Mr. Doyle?” asked the vet, dressed in scrubs that were decorated with Dalmatian spots and a name tag that said DR. ALICE.

I stood up, with my boots sounding like two huge, wet sponges. “She okay?”

Dr. Alice had a tiny scar through her top lip, which made her look like a no-nonsense sort of a lady, and I dug it. “She is! She’s fine. But she’s extremely dehydrated, and she consumed quite a lot of salt water.”

“Oh, fuck.” I had visions of a book I read a while back, about those poor bastards on the Essex. Rule one of getting lost at sea—don’t drink the motherfucking water.

But Dr. Alice didn’t look concerned. “She’ll be okay, but we have to give her some fluids. We’re also giving her some antibiotics as protection against the water in her lungs. We’d like to keep her overnight.”

Now I really felt like a dad, whatever that must feel like. Worried and heartsick. I nodded and inhaled hard. I rubbed my temples and felt sick to my stomach. Suddenly, I felt a little choked up and cleared my throat. Christ. I was turning into a goddamned marshmallow over a chicken-sized dog that I’d known for all of half an hour. Man up, dude. Keep it together. She’s okay. You heard Dr. Alice. “Can I see her?”

The doctor nodded happily and signaled for me to follow. She led me back through a series of swinging doors marked Staff Only, into a back room with cages along one wall. Though it was all set up as nice as it could be, it still felt like a prison. They had her in the top cage, and someone had made a bed out of my bath towel. Her front leg was shaved, a bare patch hardly bigger than a stamp, and a pinprick dot of blood sat on her skin. Her ears were down and her eyes wide, but when she saw me, her ears perked right up and her tail started to wag again. “Hey, cutie,” I told her and stuck my finger through the cage door. She lifted up her head and gave it a lick.

“We checked her for an ID chip, but it hasn’t been kept current. We’re trying to track down the info that we could find, though,” the doctor said. “And you said there was no collar?”

I scratched its tiny nose. It was cold, smooth, and felt like a black olive out of a can. “Nope.”

The doctor took a Sharpie from her front pocket and a piece of paper from the table. “What do you want to call her?”

I stared at the dog, and then I stared at Dr. Alice. “Jesus, I don’t know.”

“Not much of a name, sir.” She grinned with her marker hovering over a line that said Name. She skipped that line for now and filled in the following line with, “Chihuahua mix. Female, spayed.”

But the name, Christ, what about the name? Yet again, another moment when I would have loved to have some help from Rosie. She was good at this stuff. She’d have had the perfect name. Daisy or Bernadette or Gertrude. I didn’t have a mind like that, and now it was up to me completely. Because the doctor was waiting. The little lady needed a name. Dr. Alice tilted her head, raised her eyebrows. So?

I turned back to the cage and looked her in the funny eyes. She was just so fucking cute that it made my heart ache. So sweet, so little. The thing that came to mind was also one of Rosie’s most favorite things. Bonus. “How about…”

The doctor inhaled and smiled as I said it. “Perfect.” She wrote it in big block letters on the card.

Dr. Alice put the lid on her marker. “We’ll scan her chip again and try to track down her owners. But for now, Cupcake it is.”

Cupcake’s eyes stuck on mine as a huge pit bull swaggered through, its nails clacking on the ground like a lion’s. She looked terrified. I felt her fear in my bones. I didn’t know how to dance this dance, but I knew I didn’t want to leave her to dance it alone. “What if you can’t find them?”

“We will cross that bridge if we come to it.”

“All right. But don’t let her go before I can come say goodbye.”

“We won’t, sir,” said Dr. Alice.

I stuck another finger through the grating. Cupcake mashed herself against the door. I was fucking powerless against that face, and I brought my forehead to the bars. Her small pink tongue found its way through the holes in the metal grate, and she gave me a kiss. On the lips. Which was awesome. I couldn’t keep the smile off my face. “Have a good rest, little one.”

It was as if she could actually understand me, because she blinked once and began to lay down again, taking a moment to rough up the towel like a nest. Then she snuggled in and tucked her nose into the terry cloth. And I swear to God, I saw her smile before she closed her eyes and went to sleep again.

But as I got back to my truck, the sun long and golden from the west, I realized I felt…sad. Oddly empty. That might have been the only legitimately heroic thing I’d ever done. What the fuck was I going to do with myself now? Go back to my boat and read? I was hopped up on adrenaline and dog kisses with no safety net at all. No Rosie. No dinner. Just me, on my own.

And chilling alone in my boat wasn’t gonna cut it. Not tonight.

Right across the street from me was the Anchor Nurse, our local dive. No way would Rosie be there with whoever he was. No fucking way. Way too dive bar for date night, in my book. But also in my book, there was no better way to unwind than some beers and a few games of eight-ball. It wasn’t Rosie, but it was something.

That was when I saw her car, and then her. Her Bug was parked in the corner, and she was walking toward the front door of the bar. Her beautiful hair caught the setting sun. Same color as the drugstore caramels she loved. I couldn’t take my eyes off of her, and I didn’t want to either. And then I watched her extend her hand, and out from behind a parked car emerged some guy with way too much gel in his hair. With pleated khaki shorts. And loafers.