A couple’s best friend?

Stylist Jessica Champlin knows it takes more than a darling goldendoodle to save a marriage. She and her ex-husband, investigative journalist Sebastian Hess, had too many irreconcilable differences for even their beloved dog, Baxter, to heal. So they’ve agreed to joint custody, and life has settled into a prickly normalcy.

But when Baxter heroically rescues a child and the video footage goes viral, Jess and Sebastian are thrown together again, and her life takes some very unexpected twists. The line of dogwear she creates becomes wildly successful, and suddenly she’s in the spotlight with everyone watching—the press, the new guy she’s seeing, Sebastian and the past she never imagined she would face again. Soon there’s only one person by her side—and it’s the person she least expected. She’s willing to open up to a new normal…just as long as Baxter approves.

www.LauraCaldwell.com

Praise for Laura Caldwell’s contemporary romance novels

“[A] comical roller-coaster ride…

All the characters add vibrancy to a story that explores

how we live with the mistakes we made, how we correct

the ones we can and how love forms an unfailing bond.”

—RT Book Reviews on The Night I Got Lucky

“Snazzy, gripping…gives readers an exciting taste of life

in the fast lane, exposing the truth behind the fairy tale.”

—Booklist on The Year of Living Famously

“Caldwell’s winning second novel

puts an appealing heroine in a tough situation

and relays her struggles with empathy.”

—Booklist on A Clean Slate

“You’ll need an exotic drink and some sunscreen while

you enjoy Burning the Map. I thoroughly recommend this

purely entertaining look at friendship and love.”

—Romance Reviews Today

Praise for Laura Caldwell’s

romantic suspense novels

“Claim of Innocence is guaranteed to claim

your weekend, while securing plucky lawyer heroine

Izzy McNeil a place straight at the top of your reading pile.”

—Lisa Gardner, #1 New York Times bestselling author

“Red Blooded Murder aims for the sweet spot

between tough and tender, between thrills and thought—

and hits the bull’s-eye. A terrific novel.”

—Lee Child, #1 New York Times bestselling author

“Caldwell’s taut, enjoyable thriller hits the ground

running… Caldwell’s plot moves smoothly, juggling

a number of perspectives without losing steam.”

—Publishers Weekly on The Good Liar

The Dog Park

Laura Caldwell

www.mirabooks.co.uk

This book is for those who love their dogs

more than just about anything.

Contents

Cover

Back Cover Text

Praise

Title Page

Dedication

Part I

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Part II

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Chapter 22

Chapter 23

Chapter 24

Chapter 25

Chapter 26

Chapter 27

Chapter 28

Chapter 29

Chapter 30

Chapter 31

Part III

Chapter 32

Chapter 33

Chapter 34

Chapter 35

Chapter 36

Chapter 37

Chapter 38

Chapter 39

Chapter 40

Chapter 41

Chapter 42

Chapter 43

Chapter 44

Chapter 45

Chapter 46

Chapter 47

Chapter 48

Chapter 49

Chapter 50

Chapter 51

Acknowledgments

Copyright

Part I

1

“Jess, enough with this, okay?” Sebastian said in a “weary trending toward cranky” tone. He held out a small bag that read Neiman Marcus. My divorced mind ruffled through a few statements and questions—What is it? He never used to shop at Neiman Marcus. Judging by the size of the bag it would have to be an accessory. Jewelry? For me?

But the tone of my ex-husband’s voice had pretty much eliminated the possibility that it was a gift. Also, Sebastian hadn’t bought me jewelry in a long while, and except for my engagement ring, Sebastian never bought jewelry in the United States. Always it was when he was overseas, on a story. Like the beaded chandelier earrings from a country in Africa I’d never heard of and the vintage Iraqi headdress that I wear as a necklace.

Baxter—our blond, fluffy dog—was in my arms. I kissed him on the head. “I missed you, Baxy,” I said. “I missed you so much.”

He licked my chin, and his butt squirmed as he wagged his tail. Baxy’s fifteen pounds of dog against my chest was the most comforting weight in the world to me. When I finally put him down, he tore into my bedroom where he had toys stashed under a chaise lounge, which he hadn’t seen in a week while Sebastian had him.

As Baxter rounded the corner, I looked in the bag. I laughed.

“It’s not that funny,” Sebastian said.

“Oh, c’mon.” I lifted from the bag Baxter’s blue collar and leash that I had sewn gold stars onto—stars that had come from an old Halloween costume of Sebastian’s.

The party had been Harry Potter–themed, and as much as Sebastian would normally have dismissed it as ridiculous, it had been hosted by a journalist he had always emulated. And so Sebastian had been a wizard, dressed in a purple robe with stars and a pointed hat. It’s not that he hadn’t pulled it off, I just liked to needle him when I could. I also liked the idea of a guys’ guy like Sebastian having to walk around with a dog in bedazzled gear. Or maybe I hoped the goofy collar could lessen the pain of our weekly exchange—Here’s the dog back. It’s your turn to take care of this thing we both love like a kid, the dog we got when we were trying to keep our marriage intact.

“I mean, why would you even spend your time doing something like that?” Sebastian asked.

“You know that’s what I do, right?” I said. “I’m a stylist. I style.”

Sebastian said nothing.

“I don’t know why I’m surprised,” I said. “It’s not like you ever took my job seriously.”

“Jesus, Jess, that’s not true. Why do you say that?”

“I’m a stylist. You’re a journalist. You’re the legit one.”

“You’re saying that. Not me. I never said that.” Sebastian scoffed and shook his head.

Here we were again—in the ruts of a much-treaded argument.

He pointed at the bag. “That stuff is not what you do with your styling business anyway. You dress people.”

“Do you even know what that means?”

Why did I do this? What made me want to bug him, to try and draw him into this crap?

Because it’s all you have left.

That was the thought that answered me, and it rang like a bell, a few loud chimes. Then the sound died into the distance, drifting away, just like we had done.

The strong muscles of Sebastian’s jaw tensed, clenched. He ran a hand over his curly brown hair that was cut extra short for the summer. “Of course I know what that means. To an extent.”

In total, Sebastian and I had known each other for seven years—five of them married, the last of them divorced—and yet we still didn’t have a handle on what the other did for a living. Sebastian deliberately withheld, and so I guess I did it, too, in retribution.

“Look, Jess—” Sebastian fake smiled “—we’re talking about the collar, right?”

I looked in the bag. “The collar and the leash.” I picked them up and jangled them together for effect.

“First of all, look at those.” Another shake of his head. “Baxter is a boy. Hell, he’s three years old. Bax is a man now.”

At the sound of his name, Baxter tore into the kitchen and dropped a white rubber ball at our feet, his tail thumping. Throw it for me, I could hear him thinking. C’mon, throw it for me.

Like a true child of divorce, Baxter always seemed to know when to deflect the situation.

I picked up the ball and threw it down the hall. He scampered after it, sliding a little on the hardwood floors.

“He’s a man who likes this collar and leash,” I said, lifting the bag a little.

“How do you know he likes it?”

“He prances around.”

“Baxy does not prance,” Sebastian said.

“You know he does.”

I both hated and loved the familiar feel of the conversation, the verbal poking at one another.

“He’s a fifteen-pound prancing machine,” I added, another jab.

“He only prances,” Sebastian pointed out, “when he’s really happy.”

“Exactly. And he prances when he’s wearing that collar. Point made.”

Sebastian just looked at me.

“Anyway...” I said, then let my words die.

“Anyway,” he repeated.

A beat went by. Baxter ran into the kitchen again, dropped the ball. He was a mini goldendoodle—a mix of golden retriever and poodle—and the golden part must have had strong genes because the dog would retrieve all day if we let him.

Sebastian lifted the ball, tossed it again.

“Baxter brought something else back,” he said, pointing at the bag.

I looked inside again. A white plastic bag was folded over and lay at the bottom. I picked it up and lifted a cellophane bag from inside. “Rawhide,” I read from the package. “Huh.” I looked at it—half-eaten. I looked back up at Sebastian. “Did you feed him this while he was with you?”

Sebastian raised his eyebrows, gave a slight smile.

That mouth, with its fuller bottom lip. It still got me sometimes. There was the rest of Sebastian, too—the strong body, wide shoulders and long arms that felt so good wrapped around me. But it was that lip most of all that used to get me. I ignored it, looked instead somewhere in the area of his forehead.

“You know that’s like giving your kid a bowl of taffy?” I said. “It’s completely unhealthy.”

“He’s got to eat more than raw chicken and raw eggs,” Sebastian said.

“That was one week that I did that!” I said. “One week.”

I’d been led by our dog trainer to give Baxter a raw diet, lured by the promises of a glossy coat and exceptional health. But when you have your dog every other week, raw foods are hard to keep around all the time. (And kind of unpleasant to serve.)

Sebastian sighed a little and searched my eyes with his. But then he opened his mouth. “I’m on my way to the airport.”

Wounds, no longer old, felt jabbed, hurt again. Sebastian was a war correspondent, one of the most well respected. His job had long been our sticking point—his need to go overseas, and his agreeing to not tell anyone, including his spouse, where he was headed. I knew military spouses had to deal with that, but I hadn’t married military, and I hadn’t realized the extent of his investigative writing—the embedding with the troops, the being in the middle of the action.

So he was off once more. I knew better than to ask where he was going.

But apparently he felt some kind of duty to try and make nice. “It’s a small conflict.”

A “small conflict” could mean a bloody, ruthless battle in a small Middle Eastern territory. But “small conflict” did not mean small casualties. Sebastian himself had returned from a “small conflict” with a gash across his collarbone that looked a lot like someone had tried to cut his throat. He still hadn’t told me what had happened. I still didn’t know where he’d been because the newspaper never published his piece for whatever reason.

Baxter ran back into the foyer, a blue earthworm toy hanging from his mouth.

“C’mere, Dogger,” Sebastian said. His own nickname for Baxter. He picked him up. “I suppose you’re going to the dog park now?” he asked me. I thought I heard another small sigh.

“You know that you can still go to the dog park, right? I didn’t get that in the divorce.” I paused, made my voice kinder. “I don’t know why you don’t go when he’s with you.”

Sebastian shrugged, petted Baxter. “I thought I would find a park by my neighborhood. But they’re not the same. He doesn’t have his buddies.”

I stayed silent. Even when we were together, I was the one, more than Sebastian, who took Bax to the park. And even when Sebastian did, he didn’t often talk to the owners of Baxter’s dog buddies like I did. Sebastian was intent on quality time with the dog, throwing Baxy’s ball over and over, then having him sit and stay for minutes on end before he could retrieve it. He taught Baxter tricks that his father had taught their family golden retrievers over the years. We got the dog shortly after his dad died.

So it seemed obvious to me that Sebastian could continue to do those things in another park. I hadn’t expected him to miss the park that we went to, as he apparently did. But I guess change is tough for everyone, even a tough guy like Sebastian.

He stood. “I should go.”

I knew better than to ask when he’d return, because I knew the answer. When I have the story. That’s what he always said.

I used to think, Why aren’t we your story? I want to be your story.

We had made a plan—move from New York, where we were living at the time, to Chicago (his hometown) where he would work as a regular journalist. It “worked” for a little while. A year or so. But ultimately Sebastian couldn’t stop. He couldn’t explain why, but he had to be the correspondent who crossed enemy lines in the middle of the night. I encouraged him to let me in. Keep the job, I’d said. I’d get used to worrying about him, I’d told him. That was okay. But bring me into the fold, tell me what you do, what you feel when you’re there, how I can support you when you’re here.

He decided that it would be breaking confidences and so he couldn’t tell me—not about the stories he was covering, where he was covering them or who he was covering them with. I could read the pieces in the paper, usually a day or two ahead of everyone else. So I would know then, for example, that he’d been in Afghanistan, embedded with a navy SEAL team that took out a top-level terrorist. I would also read the byline and see that he sometimes had cowriters. But he couldn’t fill in any blanks. He couldn’t answer questions. And if the story had been killed and never published, he couldn’t give me any clues. Or he wouldn’t. Same thing.

His inability showed me the gaps in our relationship. I had to decide if I could live with the not knowing, the having to make a leap of faith to trust him, when the fact was I knew little about how my husband spent his professional life. And, therefore, much of his life.

I decided I couldn’t do that. Or maybe I just couldn’t live with the disappointment of not having the kind of love I wanted. I’d thought that with Sebastian I’d had the kind of love my parents had, the kind I’d felt once before. But neither turned out to be true. And eventually, with Sebastian, the ball I’d been pushing uphill for so long started to roll back over me.

Now I looked at Sebastian, said nothing, just stared into his eyes, and some bigger strength kicked in. I was past that, I told myself. I was way past it, and I was past him.

I’d started my life over once before. And under much, much, much worse circumstances. I knew I could do it again. I could survive.

Neither of us said anything. But I felt a joint sense of tiredness. We’re done.

“Okay,” I said, just to say something.

When Sebastian didn’t reply, the moment of pause gave me time to make a decision. I decided then I wasn’t just going to survive. I was going to thrive. I was going to come alive.

Right now. Those words intoned through me.

And suddenly it seemed clear what I had to do right then, how I had to conduct myself going forward. There would be no more seeing life as an endurance exercise. No more considering dates just because a software program told me I should. I wouldn’t just react to Sebastian or the lack of him. I would stop seeing everything as a reminder of the lives past. I would open my eyes and see things differently.

I would be different.

“Have a good trip,” I said, and I opened the door.

2

After Sebastian left, I put Bax in the gold-starred blue collar, clipped on the matching leash, and Baxter and I took a come-to-Jesus walk. It was the kind of walk we needed in order to get reacquainted after a week apart, in order to become Jess and Baxter again. Such walks were usually long and meandering, often around favorite places like the Lincoln Park Lagoon or the beach, but always landing at the dog park. Once we came back from such a walk, Bax and I always returned to normal. To get Baxter acquainted to the neighborhood again, I first walked Baxter down State Street, cutting up and around Goethe, Burton and Astor, letting him stop and sniff every wrought iron fence and bountiful bush that he wanted. It was a gorgeous summer day, one that was warm but not unbearable as the previous three weeks had been. Instead of huddling in air-conditioned rooms (or coffee shops or bars) everyone was outside. This was the same route Sebastian and I used to take when we first got Baxter. It was hard not to think of that time.

The decision to get a puppy had been carefully debated, test-driven. We had long thought we’d get a shelter dog. We had volunteered at rescues, had run 5K races to raise money for no-kill facilities. We regularly visited adoption places in Chicago. We dogsat and read dog books and frequented dog parks. In the end, we fell in love with the idea of a goldendoodle (no shed, hypoallergenic) and a mini one. Sebastian pointed out that a dog under twenty pounds could travel with us. We could travel. That’s what he’d said. We. And we decided we wanted a puppy, a brand-new being in the brand-new world we were creating. Or trying to create.

So we investigated every breeder. We visited many. We called people who’d gotten puppies from them before. It felt, joyously, like Sebastian and I were working together on one of his stories.

The day we got him felt so alive in my memory, I could almost touch it when I closed my eyes. A responsibility never felt so good before—the responsibility of deciding to take custody of a new creature, a new ball of life energy, and pledging to care for it.

We decided I would take the wheel during the three-hour drive to Indiana. Sebastian would drive the return trip while I rode with the puppy in the back, which the breeder had recommended for bonding.

We’d already been once to the breeder’s farm, run by a young family, with a red barn behind the house. So it wasn’t a surprise to walk in that house in the middle of winter and see two litters of squirming golden fluff. But what was different was that one would be ours. Ours. I loved that word.

Sebastian and I clasped hands tight as the breeder led us to the eight-week-old litter in the back—six dogs, four females and two males, one of whom was soon to be (that word again) ours.

The breeder was in her late thirties with curly copper hair that matched some of the dogs in her barn. She smiled over her shoulder at us. “Ready?”

She opened an octagon-shaped enclosure that held the litter and quickly waved a hand. “Get in before one gets out.”

We were rushed by puppies—scraps of panting aliveness crawling over us, their faces peering up at ours, pink tongues darting at our chins.

“How are we going to decide?” Sebastian asked. He laughed then, as a red-goldish puppy climbed up and stuck her tongue in Sebastian’s nose.

The hour we spent in that pen was a different world in a different time. We were suspended in between our old lives and our new, and we both knew it.

While all the pups scrambled and licked and nibbled, one boy was a ferocious biter and a jumper. I kissed him on the head. “I feel bad but we’ve ruled him out,” I told Sebastian.

“What about this one?” He held out a two-and-a-half-pound little girl, already sleeping in the palm of his hand. I took her and cuddled her to me, letting her siblings squirm around Sebastian and me, both cross-legged in the pen.

She burrowed into the crook of my neck as I held her up. “She’s one of the front-runners,” I said.

We played with each of them, trying to be systematic, which was impossible. We came up with names for them to try and keep them separate—Cutie for the sweet, sleepy girl, Biter for the ruled-out boy.

Big Eyes was what we called the other boy. He had an interesting way of observing the group, happy to sit back for a moment when it wasn’t his turn and watching the other pups and us before deciding to get back into the fray with a paw to the head of one of his sisters. He was a lover, too, kept burrowing his snout in the crook of Sebastian’s knee or under my sweater. Pretty soon, we loved him back. And Big Eyes became Baxter.

But even though Baxter was the best of dogs, beloved by us both, Sebastian and I didn’t stay together, and now we shared that soul that we’d adopted.

Baxter pulled hard on the leash, maybe sensing I was lost in my thoughts. As we made our way to North Avenue and he realized we were headed for the park, he tugged even harder, his little golden legs churning.

“Take it easy, buddy,” I said, but I smiled. As Baxter’s legs churned faster, I could see the images flying through his head—the dog friends he might see, the birds he might chase.

I looked at my watch, hoping the other dog owners we knew would be there. We were people who probably wouldn’t know each other otherwise. But our dogs were friends. Odd and simple as that. And so we had roughly learned each other’s schedules. And we shot to meet up in the late morning like now.

At this hour, during the weeks Sebastian had Baxter at his place, I really didn’t know what to do with myself. Sometimes, I would still go to the park and chat with the others, but I always felt forlorn, rubbing the mini tennis ball inside my pocket, no dog to throw to, always missing Baxter. Sometimes Sebastian.

Although any missing of the ex would stop now, I reminded myself, since I planned to come alive without Sebastian.

We reached the park and, as hoped, some of Baxter’s pals and their owners were there. Among the dogs was Comiskey—a border collie named after former White Sox Comiskey Park, but called Miskie for short—and a pug named Miss Puggles. The pug had a historical air about her, one of a heavy, corseted woman who talked in a high voice, always held an aperitif in hand, but Miss Puggles was always social and friendly. Rounding out Baxter’s pals in attendance was a tiny scrap of white fluff named Daisy. Daisy must have weighed all of eight pounds, but she had the heart of a German shepherd. She chased after the other dogs, her little legs racing doubly fast.

As we entered the park, Daisy skidded into the sandy baseball pitch after a ball. Then Baxter and Daisy saw each other, and, as always, it was all Romeo and Juliet. Daisy’s head raised, the ball dropped, and as she churned her little legs toward Baxter, he did, too—two lovers racing across a green lawn to tangle and nip at each other.

Bax jumped and picked up the pace, making Daisy speed after him in pursuit. I stopped momentarily, thinking how similar their relationship was to Sebastian’s and mine—an awful lot of chasing on my part. But that was all done. I reminded myself I would thrive on my own. With my dog. (Whenever I got to have him.)

I walked over and spoke to Daisy’s owner, Maureen, who was talking with the British couple who owned the pug.

“Did Daisy go to the groomers?” Tabitha, the wife, asked Maureen.

“We had to. She found something dead in our alley and before I could stop her, she flipped over and rolled in it.”

“Eew,” we all said.

“Thank God Miss Puggles doesn’t do that,” Tabitha said. “She wouldn’t deign to.”

We watched as Miss Puggles sassed around the park, heavy-snouted with a light, sashaying rear. Baxter spun away from Daisy and tried to entice Miss Puggles into playing. Eventually, he turned his sights back on Daisy, and the whole thing started again.

“So you have Baxter back,” Al said to me.

“Yeah. I missed him so much.”

“I don’t know how you guys do it.”

He said this to me at least a few times a month.

His wife swatted his arm. “Al, leave it.”

“Hey, have you guys ever tried that bitter apple spray?” Maureen said. “Daisy is still chewing the one end of my couch. It’s making me crazy!”

We talked for the next thirty minutes about all things dog, from the food we fed them and their digestive systems, to their antics and habits.

The group broke up when Maureen announced she had a lunch date.

“Great. Have fun,” I said, wishing I had a lunch date myself. But who did I want that date to be with? I had no idea.

I hadn’t met many people since Sebastian and I split up. I’d made a stab at internet dating, but felt too out of the game to make a decision to go out with any of the guys who’d written me. I’d since canceled my membership. I was too concerned, apparently, with picking over the life I’d had with Sebastian.

But now that I’d decided to move on, I should grab opportunities. Maybe I’d go out with the weather guy that my broadcaster friend was always trying to set me up with. Maybe I’d try to date online again. I’d go after business harder, maybe start courting some of the local magazines more so I could style their shoots.

Bax and I continued our walk and when we reached the busy intersection of North and Clark I decided to take Baxter toward the nature museum and the creek behind it.

We stopped for a moment at the corner. “Sit,” I said to Baxy. He did so obediently. I smiled a smug grin, thinking, He is such a good dog. Sebastian and I got so lucky.

“Hey, Mrs. Hess.”

It didn’t used to irk me when people called me that. Sebastian was fairly well-known in Chicago and I was known as his wife. So although I hadn’t taken Sebastian’s name, preferring Jessica Champlin to Jess Hess, I never minded. But now that we were split up, now that I was on my own, it bothered me.

I turned. Then it didn’t bother me so much. “Hi, Vinnie.”

Vinnie was a sweet fifteen-year-old kid. I’d known him for a few years, since Sebastian and I had moved to this neighborhood. Back then, he went by William or Will. That was his middle name. (Apparently, his parents had named him Vincent only as a tribute to a grandfather who died on the day he was born.) But recently, upon entering high school, apparently in protest to some perceived injustice, Will started calling himself Vinnie. His parents hated it, so he kept using it. He’d told me this one time when Bax and I were at the park and Vinnie was hanging around shooting short films on his phone.

The kid was always behind that phone, videoing something. Often he chuckled, scolded himself for a bad shot or generally just mumbled low, narrating, apparently.

Once he showed me the short films he’d made. Some were silent, with a sort of French feel. Others were loud, raucous street scenes. He seemed to like the juxtaposition of the two. After that, I’d looked at the webpage where he posted his films, and saw he had a lot of followers online. A hell of a lot more than I did.

“Hey, Baxter,” Vinnie said. He bent and petted Baxter on the head. Baxter batted his golden tail on the ground.

“How’s he doing?” Vinnie said, pointing to the dog.

“Good. I just got him back from his dad.” Yeah, that was how I talked. I was Baxter’s mom and Sebastian his dad. I was fully aware that I was a childless woman in her thirties whose dog was her kid. (Hence Baxter’s winter sweaters that were just waiting to be worn and the fact that I sometimes signed emails to friends, “Jess and Baxter.” I wasn’t even embarrassed.)

Baxter stood suddenly, his nose pointed across the street, his eyes peering.

I saw a mastiff walking with his owner. (His dad, I mean.) Although Baxter weighed all of fifteen pounds, he often seemed to think he was heavier and wanted to play with dogs much larger than he was.

I considered going back to the park, where it appeared the mastiff was heading, but then Bax strained on the leash even more.

“Sit,” I said.

Nothing.

“Sit!” I demanded, pointing at the ground as I’d been instructed by an obedience trainer.

But not only did Baxter not sit—he ran. Or rather, he bolted.

And not toward the mastiff but horizontally across North Avenue to the opposite corner.

A little toddler, an adorable girl in a yellow dress, stood there with her mom in front of a bank.

“No!” I yelled. “Baxter, stop!”

If there was one behavioral issue Baxter possessed, it was that he not only wanted to play with big dogs, he wanted to play with little kids, a desire that sometimes resulted in him jumping on children, often terrifying both parent and child. Luckily, he’d never come close to biting or hurting anyone and I no longer feared he would.

Until that minute.

Baxter was running fast, and he was headed right toward the toddler.

3

Vinnie, the little jackass, laughed as Baxter ran. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw the kid raise his phone.

“No!” I yelled, not at Vinnie but at the dog.

By then Baxter had nearly reached the other side of the street.

“Baxter, no!” I yelled again.

And then he tackled the kid. Absolutely tackled her.

The mother screamed and lunged at her daughter.

A truck whizzed by. “Baxter!” I shouted, sure he was going to be mowed down.

Instead, he stood over the toddler, panting.

I charged after him, yelling his name.

When I got there, the mother was on the ground, cradling her child. The girl was surprisingly dry-eyed, but the mom was crying.

“I’m so sorry!” I said, shoving Baxter out of the way with my leg but grabbing his leash so he couldn’t get too far.

Baxter took a couple steps back, but his panting gaze remained on the toddler. She was a little beauty who was smiling and cooing in her mother’s arms, as if she had no idea the quick turn of events that had just happened.

“I’m so sorry,” I said again. I crouched next to mother and child, careful not to get too close. The mom was young, wearing white jeans and a pink T-shirt.

She looked up at me, tears rimming her blue eyes.

“I truly apologize,” I said. “He’s really a friendly dog, but sometimes he doesn’t know his limits. That’s our fault. My husband says I...”

I shut up. What did it matter what “my husband” (who was no longer my husband) thought about a dog who tackled tots? It didn’t matter that we’d gotten the dog to try and stay together, but had lost each other anyway. And it certainly didn’t matter how many obedience professionals we had contacted about this jumping problem of Baxter’s.

To my surprise, the woman smiled at me. “He saved her,” she said. “Didn’t you see that? He saved my daughter.”

“Good work, Baxter!” I heard from behind me.

I turned to see Vinnie, holding out his cell phone.

“Check this out,” he said. “That truck had no idea.”

“I know,” the mom said.

“The truck?” I said.

Vinnie stopped and looked down at the child and her mom. “She okay?”

The mom nodded vigorously. “Her name is Clara.” She held her kid tighter.

“Check this out.” Vinnie held out his phone—there was a still image of Baxter dashing across the street, his gold-starred collar gleaming and his gold-starred, blue leash blazing behind him.

“He looks like a superdog,” Vinnie said. He fiddled with his phone, then turned it back to us. “Watch this.”

He pushed Play. There was Baxter, dashing, the leash streaming behind him. But at the top of the screen...

“See the truck?” Vinnie said, crouching next to us.

I nodded. A white delivery truck. And it was headed right at Clara, who was taking a wobbly step off the curb. “Oh, my God,” I said.

Just before the truck hit her, Baxter tackled her.

“Your dog saved my daughter,” the mom said. She held out her hand. “I’m Betsy.”

I noticed Vinnie seemed to be videoing again, but I was too relieved to protest.

I shook the mom’s hand. “Jessica.”

“Jessa!” the toddler said in a mumble, mimicking me.

We all laughed.

Betsy, her arms still around Clara, turned to Baxter. “And who is this one?”

“This is Baxter.”

I let go of Baxter’s leash, and he took a few steps toward Betsy and Clara. Betsy kissed him on the top of his head. Baxter licked Clara’s ear.

“Baxter, no,” I said.

“Oh, don’t worry,” Betsy said. “In my book, this dog gets to do whatever he wants.”

I looked up at Vinnie. He was still taping our exchange. “Vinnie,” I said. “Enough.”

“Okay, cool.” He put the phone in his pocket. “But I’m putting this online.”

Words, it would turn out, that would change everything.

4

The first call came at five o’clock that evening, just eight hours after Sebastian had brought Baxter to my house.

After the incident on the street, Baxter was wiped out. We went home and he slept most of the day. I cleaned the house, returned emails about an Art Institute benefit and read through specs sent by a magazine editor I was working with. It was my first time styling a photo shoot for them. I wanted to do a great job so I could work with her again.

When Baxter finally roused, we took another walk, and I threw a ball in the alley for him.

Really, aside from the scene on the street (which, though scary, had taken only a few minutes), it was like any other day.

The phone—the landline I used for business—was ringing when we walked in the condo. It was Victory, a state senator with a great name, who had retained me for the past six months to outfit her with chic but serious suits and dresses. “Jessica, do you have a dog named Baxter?” she said.

“I do,” I said, a little surprised. Although I’d heard Victory mention a dog named DeeDee in the past, with her four children and the political job and being a consultant on the side, she had little time to chitchat about pets.

“My kids just showed me the video,” she said.

It took a minute to process. “Oh, my dog and the toddler?”

“Yeah, your dog saving the toddler. The video is called ‘Superdog’ and with that leash, he sure looks like it.”

“How did you know it was my dog?”

“There was a link to a follow-up video, and it shows you talking to the mom. I don’t know who put it up.”

“Vinnie,” I said. “He’s a neighborhood kid who shot it.” My laptop was on the counter, and I clicked on a search engine and typed in Superdog. Sure enough, there it was.

“My kids are in love with your dog. They say DeeDee needs a brother or sister. They also say the video has a thousand hits.”

“Seriously?” I peered at the screen. 1374 views, it said under the first shot—Baxter in full run, his starred leash forming a straight line behind him.

I heard kids talking in the background.

“They want to know what kind of dog it is,” Victory said.

“Goldendoodle. A mini.”

She repeated my words to her kids. I heard more children talking.

“We are not getting another dog,” she said away from the phone. Then in a lowered tone, she continued, “Out of curiosity...where did you get that dog?”

And that was the question that also arose in the next call (from a neighbor up the street) and the next (another client) and the next (Sebastian’s buddy). They’d all seen the Superdog video. They all wanted to know the story behind it. And then inevitably, “Where did you get that dog?”

I watched the video about twenty times—Baxter a flash as he bolted across the street, a blue-gold streak that became a yellow blur when he collided with Clara, the white delivery truck speeding by a nanosecond later.

I tried calling Sebastian. Baxter was his kid, too, and all that. But of course his phone was off. I didn’t even get to hear his voice, because he utilized an automated message, required by his job. He was off somewhere in that “small conflict.”

Didn’t matter. I was going to enjoy it all by myself.

The next morning, another call—from my broadcaster client, Pamela Nyman, one of Chicago’s most well-known newscasters. She now had her own morning show, and her producer had hired me to select outfits to wear on set. We’d kept working together since then and I’d shop for events for her.

“Jess,” she said, her voice hurried. “Glad I got you. Do you remember when we were at that store on Halsted? I was bitching about the videos we sometimes have to show?”

“Something about a bear?”

“Yeah. That one was a bear who put his head in a garbage can and got stuck. The beast was stumbling around with the can on its head.”

I laughed.

She groaned. “Fine, it’s funny, but it isn’t noteworthy. Sometimes I just can’t believe I have to act interested in it. Anyway, I may be coming around to these videos. I got to work this morning, and they told me we were running one.” I heard talking in the background. “We’re about to run it now, in fact. And guess whose dog is in it?”

“Oh, geez, is it Baxter?” I got a quickening of excitement.

“You got it. I recognized him from that time we had a dog date.” Pamela had a Yorkie who Baxter had hit it off with immediately. “And the video really is adorable. Remarkable. But I wanted to make sure you were okay with us showing it. I can ask the producer to kill it if you’re not comfortable.”

I thought about it. I should probably ask Sebastian first, but he was unreachable. Anyway, it would be fun.

“Hell, yeah,” I said. “Roll with it.”

“Great! We’re not showing the whole video, like the part you were in—though I saw it. You were running like a mad woman.”

“And screaming like one,” I said. “This is hilarious. It just happened yesterday.”

“That’s how these things go,” she said. “And that Baxy is damn cute. You’d better get ready.”

“For what?”

“Craziness. If you want it.”

“I want it,” I said without hesitation.

There was a shout in the background. “Gotta get on set,” Pamela said before she hung up. “Turn on the TV.”

“Baxter!” I yelled. He was in the laundry room, which was his current favorite locale to roll around with the stuffed blue earthworm.

He came trotting out, worm hanging from his mouth, while I scrambled for the remote.

“Watch, Baxy,” I said, pointing to the TV and scrolling fast to find Pamela’s network.

Baxter looked in the direction of the TV, but generally he didn’t seem to know how to focus on it.

He dropped onto his back and, holding the stuffed blue earthworm with both sets of paws, began chewing on its head.

I found the channel and saw Pamela. She was dressed in a purple dress I’d found for her at Barneys that fit tight to her great figure and highlighted her chestnut brown hair.

“Well, we like to bring you the occasional animal video,” she said with a smile (one so good-natured you wouldn’t know that she generally disliked such videos). “Usually these are humorous, often they’re cute, but it’s not all the time we get to see an animal save someone. In this case, a child. Watch.”

There was Baxter with the streaming gold stars. There was my voice shrieking at him to stop. And then the speeding truck and Baxter head-butting Clara, knocking her out of the way.

“Amazing,” said Pamela’s broadcast partner, a handsome man with a helmet of black hair. “That dog saved that kid’s life.”

“He did. And we’ve learned that the dog’s name is Baxter.”

“Baxter, the Superdog,” the male broadcaster said.

“Baxter, the Superdog,” Pamela repeated.

5

By the end of the morning, I’d had at least twenty phone calls, most from friends or colleagues who’d seen the video.

“My kid loves it!” said a friend from Manhattan. “She’s carrying around her phone and showing it to everyone in her class.”

The breeder from whom we’d gotten Baxy called, too. “We are getting calls and emails constantly! We don’t have enough litters to satisfy them all.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“Are you kidding?” she said. “This is great. It’s the best business we’ve ever had. We’ll just raise rates. And we’re sending you a finder’s fee for each one who has seen the video and buys a dog.”

“Oh, you don’t have to do that.”

“We have to do something! You’ve tripled our business in one day.”

“Really?”

“Really. You know we’re picky about our owners. We only want people who are really serious about caring for the dog. But yeah.”

“So if I think someone’s a good fit, and I make them happy by recommending one of your goldendoodles and they buy one, I’ll get a percentage?”

“Absolutely. We know another family with a smaller but similar business. They have excellent dogs, and we’ve been wanting to partner with them.”

I remembered the price we’d paid for Baxter and did the math. “Wow,” I said. “Hey, thank you for giving us Baxter. He means a lot to both Sebastian and me.”

I realized as I said it that she didn’t know we were divorced. And suddenly I didn’t want to tell her, didn’t want her to worry that our divorce caused a lack of devotion to Baxter.

“You know with your percentage,” she said, “we could also donate to your favorite charity.”

A charitable organization leaped to mind. One I hadn’t thought of in a long, long time.

“The Amalie Project,” I said. Just saying the words flooded my body with memories. I felt flush with embarrassment, humiliation and ultimately triumph from having climbed out of that space.

“The Amalie Project,” the breeder said. “What’s that?”

I couldn’t believe I’d blurted it out. “Uh...they help women in need.”

“Great! We’ll give something in your name. Aside from your fee.”

“Oh...no, that’s okay.” I didn’t want my name on the donation. My name had been associated with the Amalie Project once. Back in New York. “I’d rather it go to a rescue shelter.”

As much as I wanted to support the Amalie Project, as much as it had helped me, I did not want to go back in any way.

6

Labrabullies. That’s what Sebastian and I took to calling the two black Labradors who sometimes showed up at the dog park. Their heads were as big as basketballs, their girth like round oak barrels. The owner, a fiftyish guy, usually sat on a far park bench, sipping coffee and working furiously on his phone. As a result, the walk of the Labrabullies was a combination amble, saunter and swagger. They didn’t run. They didn’t have to. They intimidated. And there was really no one to stop them. The owner rarely noticed until one of them had nearly taken a limb off another dog.

Most dogs dropped when they saw them. They pretended to be part of a tree stump or to feign a stroke.

But not Baxter. Instead, he always trotted around them, orange squeaky ball in his mouth. He did this despite how we tried to direct him elsewhere, how I pulled him into the long grassy area to play fetch, normally one of his favorite activities. And always, the Labrabullies would lunge and snarl at him, try to take away his ball. And yet the next time we saw them, Bax would do it again. He simply couldn’t seem to stand the thought that the bullies didn’t like him. There was no way to explain to Bax that they were equal-opportunity haters.

So it wasn’t surprising when Baxter headed toward the Labrabullies that day he was on morning TV. What was different was his direct approach. Maybe it was subconsciously knowing that he was Superdog that caused Baxter to not just approach the bullies in a circular fashion that day but to charge over to them. Maybe it had been the tackling of the little girl, which he had not been punished for in any way.

“Hey, Baxter!” I shouted. “Come!”

He feigned deafness.

When Baxter reached the bullies, per regular custom, they charged at him, growling. Baxter threw in a sneak move and dropped his ball, then took a few steps back, so they could hoover it. The Labrabully with the dingy red collar tossed it to the one with a gray collar, who ran it to a wading pond and dunked the ball like bread in olive oil, then began to eat it. The red one stood by, ready to take over if needed.

Baxter headed toward the eating bully, while some other dogs moved along with him. Rather than egging him on, the other dogs seemed to be trying to herd him away, to telepathically say, Let it go, pal. It is so not worth it.

I ran toward him from across the park. “Baxter!”

Baxy ignored all of us, trotting toward the bullies. Once there, without warning, he swatted the one with the gray collar with his furry paw. A ferocious snarl arose from the bully, a column of hair standing up on his back. The owner noticed for once and he ran, too, dropping his coffee en route, then grabbing one of his dogs before it locked its jaws on to Baxy.

“Sorry, sorry,” the owner said to me.

“It’s his fault, too,” I said, grabbing Baxter and picking him up.

After I scolded him (“Baxter, when I say ‘come’ you come”), Bax retreated to a bench, sitting under it for about ten minutes. But then he was over the trauma, and he emerged from under my legs, looking around. I thought he was checking out the scene for the arrival of some of his pack—Daisy or Miss Puggles—but when he was twenty feet away from me, I noticed he was running for the bullies. And they were running for him.

“Baxter!” I yelled. “Come!”

I heard the Labrabully owner swear. “Damn it, Boomer, Capone! C’mere! Time to go.”

But the Labrabullies answered to no one. When they reached Baxter they started pacing around him, looking exactly like large animals do when they’ve found a good appetizer.

My phone started ringing in my pocket. I ignored it. “Baxter!”

The bully owner and I were at a fast trot toward the dogs now, the bullies closing their circle, their stalking faster.

But then Baxter dropped. Not like other dogs usually do at the sight of the bullies, trying to be invisible. Baxter went onto his back, showing his sweet belly and then writhed around as if to say, It’s okay, smell me.

Which is exactly what the bullies did. No lunging, no more snarling. By the time the owner and I reached them, the three were cozied up to one another, the bullies nudging Baxy with their noses, as if they loved him, finally ready to play.

“Jesus Christ,” the owner muttered, chuckling and looking down at the dogs. “I’ve never seen them like this.” He looked at me. “You got a special dog.”

“Thanks,” I said, taking a breath of relief at the sight of Baxter batting a paw at one of the bullies who replied by simply ducking his nose, ready to take another punch.

“What’s that collar he’s got?” the guy said.

“I made that collar to piss off my ex-husband.”

This caused him to laugh.

I told him about how Sebastian hated it and always tried to replace it with something plainer.

“He’s crazy,” the guy said. “That’s a good-looking collar.”

“Right?”

“Heck, yes.”

I told him about the leash, how both had been in the video. He hadn’t seen it, so I explained the video.

He pulled it up on his phone. He laughed and laughed, then played it a second time, actually holding it out for the bullies, who sorta seemed to watch it for a bit.

“You want me to make you one?” I said, immediately wondering if I’d taken the whole bully diplomacy a little too far.

But the guy just said, “Sure! Could you do one in red and another in blue?”

“You got it.” We exchanged information. He took off the red collar of one of the bullies, and I eyeballed the size.

My phone started ringing again. I pulled it out of the pocket of my jeans. More surprise.

The screen read, Mom.

There is nothing more irritating than a person raised in a loving household, one who has been provided everything, but who finds something lacking in that setting. Nothing except being that person.

I knew this because I had always greatly disliked myself for feeling the lack of love from my parents, Simon and Muriel Champlin. They were so in love with each other that they were nearly oblivious to everyone else. It was clear how much they adored each other, and it was understandable. They were exceptional people who were exceptional together. And when two people love each other like they do, it’s an exclusive thing. They tried to spread it to me. They tried. And they did love me in their way. But I always knew I didn’t have what they did, that they couldn’t feel toward me the way they did toward each other.

So my mother and I didn’t speak with any regularity. But now she was talking quickly and excitedly. “I saw Baxter on TV!”

My parents lived out east, in a college town with a historical race course, and the only time they’d met Baxter was during a short holiday visit a year and a half ago.

“You saw it on TV or the internet?” I asked. My mother rarely watched TV.

“It just ran on our news here.”

“Are you kidding?”

“No. I turned it on to see the weather. Your father is hoping to do some work outside tomorrow.”

My parents were both artists. My father had been an urban planner first, then he became fascinated with remnants of demolished government and legal buildings. He eventually brought the materials home and retrofitted our garage to become his studio. He crafted large, avant-garde items—a huge witness stand from chunks of cement, a Doric column from cobbled shards of copper, the scales of justice from molded scrap metal. The town purchased the scales of justice to decorate the front of the courthouse. Now such pieces were all my father did, and he got paid well for them.

My mother was a completely different artist. Technically trained and meticulously detailed, her oil paintings and mixed-media pieces were delicate, lovely. But there was also something savage within them—red streaks hidden deep in a meadow, a blade in a child’s profile. My mother said she was exploring. My father, she said, had been the only person in her life to allow that exploration. It took her years, but finally a gallery in New York was interested in her. They represented her, helped create an audience for the double-edged quality of her art. She became a working artist. But she always catered to my dad, always put him first.

So now it made sense that my mother was watching the news only to check the weather for my dad, who lately took much of his work outside in decent weather.

I explained to my mother about the Baxter incident, how Vinnie shot the video and posted it, how it ran on Chicago’s morning news. And now my mother was telling me it had been shown on her local newscast.

My mother asked me about the collar and leash, and I told her I’d sewn the stars on it, told her about the sale I’d just gotten from the Labrabullies’ owner.

“Good for you! They’re gorgeous!” My parents were happiest when I was being creative, the way they were. “We have neighbors who just got two Irish setter puppies. Would you make the same collars for them? We want to give them a gift.”

“Sure, I’d love to.” It was always a treat to feel a sense of cohesiveness with one of my parents (even if only about dog accoutrements).

“Honey,” my mom said, her voice holding a little trepidation, then trailing off at the end. Finally she said, “I know this Baxter thing is fun, but is it okay? I mean are you okay?”

“I’m very okay, Mom. I’m actually great.”

“Is any of this excitement about the video bringing up past...inclinations?”

I felt a flash of irritation. “Mom,” I said in a low, strained voice. “I never had those inclinations. That’s not why it happened.”

Here was the other reason my parents and I didn’t talk often. They knew about the Amalie Project and what had led to it.

“I know,” my mother said. “You’ve told me that. But we worry.”

“Don’t!” I wanted to say, Why didn’t you worry about me when I was growing up? Why didn’t you ever worry until I was in too deep? Before I slipped away?

My mother sighed. “Okay, okay.” Silence and then she asked, “So when do you think you can have the collars done for the puppies?”

“I’ll put it at the top of my list.” I wanted to be nice to my mom. There was no reason not to be. She and my dad were who they were, never anything else. “I’ll send them within a few days.”

“Oh, take your time. Don’t put stress on yourself.”

“It’s not stress.”

“You just don’t want to get so overwhelmed that you go back to past habits.”

“Mom!”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry.”

I took a deep breath. I asked about my dad. She gave me a quick rundown—all was good—and then she was off to find her husband.

7

The next call surprised me even more than my mom’s.

Sebastian.

He’d seen the video online, and he actually sounded a tad excited himself. Not like my mom had, but definitely amused, interested.

“Isn’t it hysterical?” I told Sebastian about Baxter darting and Vinnie shooting the whole thing.

We fell right into conversation, the way we used to a long time ago—no awkward “Hi, how ya been feeling? Okay, how about you?” chitchat.

When something like this happened—rarely, I grant you—it made me remember that when we were “us,” Sebastian and I had a hell of a lot of fun.

One of the reasons I’d shut down my online dating profile without even going on a date was because I feared that no one could be quite as fun as Sebastian when he wanted to be. And I knew fun, having been deeply involved (way too deep, it would turn out) in my teens and twenties with a touring rock band.

The problem, toward the end of us, was Sebastian hadn’t desired much fun with me. It had made me terribly wistful—remembering the days when Sebastian was on, when we were engaged. Sometimes, he would wake me at five in the morning and he would make some crazy dish—whatever he’d found at the ready-market that morning, whatever his imagination lit upon. Once, it was pretzels and scrambled eggs with cheese and hot sauce. His were the most bizarre breakfasts and the most delicious because he infused them with that fun. He brought that sense of fun to each day. He loved to “call an audible,” as he put it, hitting a last-minute Cubs game, or going to see a blues band at Kingston Mines.

But there was no such fun like that in the last year of our marriage. It was one of the factors that made me say, Okay, let’s give up.

But the conversation about our child dog was fun. “And you know it was on the news,” I told Sebastian.

“What do you mean?” He didn’t sound so amused. “Who was on the news?”

“Baxter. On Pamela’s morning show. It wasn’t just a video on the internet.”

He groaned.

“What?”

“They must have been desperate.”

“It was cute,” I said. “And then my mom called from New York. It was on their news, too.”

“Are you kidding?”

I ignored the slightly scornful tone.

“My mom called,” I repeated. I knew that would stop him. He knew I had issues with my parents that had been visited and revisited at therapists’ offices.

“Oh?” he said.

“Yeah. We had a great conversation.”

I told Sebastian about it. And maybe he was in a good mood—maybe because I’d mentioned my parents and he knew that could be a tough situation for me—because soon, he softened, I could tell. It was his tone when he responded, asked questions, it was the volume of his voice, too, that showed his level of interest. I was awarded with his full attention—questions illuminated with years of hearing about Simon and Muriel Champlin.

“How old are they now?” he said.

“Sixty-six. My mom’s sixty-five.”

“My mom’s seventy next year.” He told me of his own recent conversations with his mom. Not that his mom was anything like mine. On the contrary, she loved and adored Sebastian so much that I was pretty sure that she was secretly relieved at our divorce. That should have made me feel bitter, I suppose, but instead it only made me feel more wistful when I thought of the kind of mother’s love and adoration he got from her.

Sebastian scoffed. “I can’t believe the dog was on the news out in the sticks.”

It was the scoff that brought me back. I had heard that scoff too many times.

“What’s up, Hess?” I said, putting on a chummy tone. “You’ve got a problem with your dog being on a video?”

“Well, it’s not news.”

I wanted to bite back. But that would only start up an argument. I changed the topic, and we talked for a few minutes about nothing.

And as often happened when Sebastian and I had some kind of clash on the phone, or in this case a near clash, I took to walking around the condo, Baxter, our de facto kid, at my feet. We had spent time designing and decorating every room. The condo was our first real place together (he’d moved into mine when we were in New York). There was the joint office, and the master bedroom with the Moroccan-inspired leather headboard, the wide-planked hardwood floors we’d chosen for throughout the rest of the condo. We’d done it together. Hence, this condo was ours. I still felt like that most of the time.

But when we fought, and I walked the place, that’s when I could remind myself that this was mine now.

It took some of the sting away from Sebastian’s haughty opinions about what constituted news. I don’t know if he ever understood how much it hurt when he did that, especially back when I was working for a local magazine he considered “just a society rag—it’s a grown-up yearbook.”

That reminder rankled me, and I asked how his trip was going, just to bug him.

I got a few mumbled words in response.

“C’mon, where are you?” I asked, not because I thought he’d tell me, but more because I wanted to needle him.

“Jess,” was all he said in a tight voice.

I sighed.

I went into the kitchen with its 1950s dining chairs and the kitchen table, which had been Sebastian’s grandfather’s worktable, adorned with new legs.

“You’re back when?” I said. Another jab.

But he didn’t take the bait. “I do love you, Jess,” Sebastian said.

I waited, then muttered, “I love you, too.” Even though it didn’t matter.

We were both silent.

“Sebastian,” I said his name back to him. Not with a question mark, just said it.

At his name, Baxy seemed to have realized who I was talking with. He’d been playing with an old sock of Sebastian’s, but then his head shot up and he ran over, jumped on a kitchen chair, black nose in the air, pink tongue hanging from his mouth in a happy pant.

We fell quiet again, and in the silence of me and Sebastian, I leaned over and stroked Baxter’s neck. He stretched his head up to allow more.

Then Sebastian had to go, and I said goodbye. I’m not sure he heard me.

When I hung up, Baxter looked at me, then looked around, his eyes quickly scanning the room, darting back to me. I could hear him thinking, But where is he?

“Gone,” I said. “Gone.”

8

Sebastian returned to Chicago a week after he left. A short trip for him. He called on the way home from the airport.

“How’s Superdog?” he said when I answered.

I looked at Baxter, who sat on the checkerboard kitchen floor, patiently waiting for me to scoop his lunch into his bowl.

“He’s super.”

“I missed him.”

“I know.”

Baxter always seemed to ground Sebastian. When we’d first gotten him, Sebastian was suddenly happier working in the home office—the office we’d outfitted just to make Sebastian feel inspired, feel as if he was back in New York, with a row of state-of-the-art TVs that showed—close-up and raw—news stations around the world. The BBC usually ran on the monitor closest to him, except for Saturdays in the fall when all the TVs bore college football, the most prominent being whichever game Iowa was playing in.

Sebastian had gone to Iowa, strictly for the writing program. Creative writing. He didn’t know then that he would stray to journalism, that it would hook him in and turn him on in a way that was different from creative writing. He suddenly knew one day in his senior year, in the middle of a seminar on fiction writers who turn to nonfiction. He didn’t want to make people up. He wanted to write about the people who were. War reporters and investigative journalists—those were the heroes, those were the people he wanted to be. After graduating he spent years living in Italy, working on a book exposing various Berlusconi scandals.

I met him a year after his first book on Italian politics was published. It was such a lively book—written in a lively voice about admittedly lively people who had a lot of sex—that it was on the bestseller lists for two weeks, enough to get him another contract. It had made him sparkle, that book deal, which had just been inked the day we met. The sparkle gave him something beyond the sexy hair, the strong jaw, the soft eyes that didn’t so much bore into yours as melt into them, and that bottom lip of his. It made him reverberate with charisma.

On the kitchen floor now, Baxter rolled over to show his belly. Rub me, please!

I bent and put my hand on his warm dog belly, using him for comfort while I broke the news to Sebastian. I told him that since he was gone, Baxter’s video was still running on news stations around the country, the web video getting nearly half a million hits.

“Christ,” he said. “That’s crazy.”

I said nothing, waiting for a nice whip of sarcasm.

He waited, too, probably for me to make some crack about his attitude, launch into the ruts of priors.

Instead, Sebastian took an audible breath. “How is he handling it?” he asked.

I looked down at Baxter again, who flipped back to a sit. He thumped his tail, then tilted his head as if he expected something, a trait I couldn’t recall him doing before. “He might be getting a bit of child star syndrome,” I said. “Possibly impatient. But otherwise he’s great.”

I put Baxy’s food on the floor and he gave my wrist a quick lick in thanks before he nose-dived into the bowl. “Nah,” I said to Sebastian. “Not really. He’s still our little guy.”

“I miss him,” he said again.

“I know,” I said again.

We chatted for a few minutes about some clients who had recently retained me again to outfit them for a wedding, about the magazine editors I’d had lunch with last week who’d promised work, about a good friend of Sebastian’s who had sold a book, about Sebastian’s family.

It would be the last normal conversation we would have for a long time. If I had known it, I might have thought to couch what I told him next. “The national news is going to run it.”

“What?” A distinctive snip to his voice that I knew meant displeasure.

“Baxter’s video.”

“What national news program?”

I wasn’t sure. I told him a producer had called.

“What was his name?”

I looked at the stack of cut up, old index cards that I used for notes in the kitchen. I read off the person’s name.

“Jesus, are you serious?” Sebastian said. “I know that guy. Does he know Baxter is my dog?”

“I don’t think so. I didn’t mention it because it didn’t seem like you’d want people to know that.”

He exhaled in a short burst, as if through clenched teeth. “I have to go.” He hung up.

Yet an hour later, he was knocking at the door of my condo.

I peered through the keyhole and saw him. This is my condo, I thought. Mine.

Of course, Sebastian knew the doorman, who had simply let him up. Still, the building staff also knew we were divorced. It annoyed me that they would give him free reign, without so much as a warning call to me, even if it was to tell me he was elevator-bound.

I glanced down at what I was wearing—yoga clothes for a class I planned to attend—gray pants, a thin, hot-pink top. I reached back and pulled my hair over one shoulder, smoothing the front and tucking the other side behind my ear. It occurred to me only as I was in the middle of the action that I was doing it because that was how Sebastian liked it.

But he definitely wasn’t in the mood to appreciate my hair.

He strode inside. “Hi.” He stopped suddenly, as if realizing in that instant he didn’t live there anymore.

“Hi?” I tried to keep the irritation from my voice, but it was hard.

“Where’s Baxter?”

“He’s playing at Daisy’s house.”

Sebastian looked a little blank.

“You know Daisy,” I said. “From the dog park.”

“I didn’t know they had play dates,” he said.

“Usually when one of us has to work. Maureen came and got him after we got off the phone.”

Sebastian nodded. “Well, I just wanted to tell you, in person, that I got ahold of him.”

“Who?”

“Paul.” The national news producer. I opened my mouth, but Sebastian kept talking. “They’re not going to run it.”

9

After Sebastian spoke those words—They’re not going to run it—I spun around and marched to our bedroom. I mean, my bedroom!

“Hey, Jess,” I heard Sebastian say, still in the kitchen.

I kept walking, breathed in deep, then again and again. I had promised myself that I wouldn’t let Sebastian make me sad or angry anymore.

I stepped into the bedroom and closed the door. I inhaled slowly. I was alive without him, I reminded myself.

After a minute I opened the door and, trying to tone down the marching, walked back to the kitchen. Sebastian sat on one of our kitchen chairs (my kitchen chairs), a leg crossed, ankle resting on the knee. He looked at me with a confused, maybe a little scared, expression. I couldn’t read him like I used to.

“Why would you do that?” I asked.

“What?”

“Get the producer to cancel the piece on Baxter.”

“Because it’s not news.”

“What do you care if your dog is on a news program?” I asked. “Even if it’s not ‘news’?”

“I happen to be a journalist who works in real news and I don’t want anyone associating me with the dog video.”

“Are you embarrassed by Baxter?”

“Of course not. Jesus.”

“By me?”

A scoff.

“Well, then what? Do you think that some source in Pakistan won’t give you information if he knows your dog is in a video?”

He said nothing.

“Will the army not let you embed with some troop?”

Sebastian scowled.

“Hey, just show them that he saved a kid.” I shook my head. “Do you even care that the video makes people happy?”

“I’m not here to make people happy.”

“Well, what if your ex-wife is expanding her business because of being on these programs? Would that make you even a little happy? What if she wanted to make people happy?”

“What do you mean?”

“I want to show you something.” My breath was still short. I hadn’t shown anyone, or even talked to anyone, about what I’d been up to this past week—staying up past midnight and getting up at five to work again.

I gestured at him to follow me. He stood. I walked him into the office.

Where Sebastian’s desk used to be, a long folding table now resided. On the closest end was my sewing machine in front of a chair. In the middle was an empty space where I stood when I flipped through magazines, searching for inspiration, but rarely having to do so for very long.

I walked toward the far end of the folding table, Sebastian following me. There lay piles (organized by color) of plain, inexpensive dog collars and leashes, along with rolls of ribbon and small plastic boxes of embellishments.

I explained to Sebastian how people had been contacting me since the day of the video. “At first,” I told him, “they wanted to order the Superdog collar or leash, sometimes both. It took me hardly any time to make them. Then things started expanding.”

“Expanding how?” Sebastian stood with his hands behind his back, bent over my materials as if he were in a museum studying a display case.

I held up a few sheets of paper with print on them. “These are all the orders I have to fill in the next week.”

Sebastian scanned the first page, then the next. “There are at least forty.”

“I know. And I bet when I check my email, I’ll have another five or ten.”

He looked at me over the sheet. “Do you have a website?”

“Not for this. I have that static one for my styling business. People have been tracking me down through that. Like I said, first, they wanted the Superdog stuff. Now they’re putting in their own ideas. It’s like I take their idea, track down the materials and make it.”

“Wow,” Sebastian said. “That’s amazing.”

“Thanks. It’s not technically that hard. The tough part is keeping track of everything and responding to everyone and then getting it shipped. But it’s fun and creative, and now I’m starting to get all these ideas about designs for other dogwear and accessories.”

“Dogwear?”

“I’m coining a new term. And no, I don’t want your opinion on it.”

He smiled, but barely. “Can I sit down?”

I waved my arm at the room and slightly shrugged like, I can’t stop you.

Sebastian took the order sheet and sat on a light blue chair that had been his grandmother’s. He’d never liked it, so I got to keep it. He didn’t look at the order form, though. At first, his eyes roamed the office, maybe taking note of the loss of him in that room. The rest of his family’s handed-down furniture was in his new apartment in Roscoe Village. Whenever I visited him there, I felt a little jealous, because the neighborhood was charming. There were wine shops and restaurants and boutiques of all kinds, and people strolled happily with their kids or their partners.

As Sebastian kept assessing the office, I wondered if he was noticing the things I’d added—like a painting of a ballerina I bought in New York when I was twenty-four and which Sebastian had found too feminine. It now hung in the spot that had once held Sebastian’s framed map of Colonial America.

Suddenly, there was a crack of thunder, and a summer storm started pounding the windows, the room darkening. But strangely, neither of us moved. Sebastian’s eyes kept sweeping the room, quickly taking stock the way he always did, taking mental notes. His eyes stopped when they reached mine, and again neither of us moved. An energy seemed to hold us there, one that felt both powerful and calm, no anger bubbling around the edges.

We were, I felt in that instant, observing a marriage that once was.

He uncrossed his leg and nodded at his lap.

A mix of surprise and longing arose within me. That nod was what Sebastian used to do when he wanted me to sit on his lap. Often the reason was to discuss something, other times it was because he wanted to kiss me. I didn’t know which reason was applicable here. I hesitated.

“Jess,” he said in a voice that was tired but caring.

I walked across the room and perched on his legs, a movement that felt so familiar it caused an ache. Sebastian felt warm. He smelled faintly of the fragrance he wore that was part leather, part something like lavender. That scent alone had made me swoon many a time. I leaned back a little.

“You know what this reminds me of?” he said. “Block Island.”

I took a breath, emotions coursing through me. Block Island was where I first told him I loved him.

I had actually known that I loved him just a few months after meeting him, but I kept quiet. Turns out I didn’t have to wait long. Just a few weeks after my realization, we were at a party and he stopped me when I came out of the bathroom, no one else in the hallway. “I love you, you know. So much.”

I pretended to ruminate upon that revelation, said I needed to warm up to the idea of love. Technically, it was true. Because I knew—all too well—the destruction that could result from love.

But then one summer night, I returned the sentiment. We were lying in a rented room in Block Island—sandy sheets, candles in hurricane lamps—and I said it into his chest. “I love you, too.”

He was so happy. He squeezed me hard. He kissed me on the top of my head, then pulled me up and kissed my forehead, then my eyes, then my mouth. We murmured the words to each other over and over.

Soon after, he fell asleep quickly, as if hearing those words from me had finally allowed him to relax. I watched as his sable brown eyelashes fluttered with dreams, and it hit me. I will lose him.

I understood, in that moment, or maybe I should say that I remembered, that all things end, especially good things. At some point, either Sebastian would die or I would or we would break up. At some point, I would lose him. That recognition cut sharply through me, so exquisitely painful.

Tears sprang from my eyes that night on Block Island. I choked on a quick-rising sob.

“What?” Sebastian said, waking fast. A confused look around, his journalist eyes taking in and registering the details of where, what, who and when.

His eyes had looked at me, those eyes the same chestnuty-sable color as his lashes. “What is it, baby?” he said.

I took a deep breath, let it fly. I explained what I was thinking, feeling, realizing, about the eventual end of us.

He pulled me tight to him again. He brushed my bangs off my forehead and kissed my temples, my eyes. “You won’t lose me,” he said.

I knew that Sebastian meant what he’d said. I also knew that, unintentionally, he’d been lying.

“Block Island was great,” I said now, in my apartment. I stood up.

Block Island is over. And I am alive without you.

After a moment, Sebastian stood, too. He walked to the end of the folding table and fingered the various collars, leashes, embellishments.

He held up a pink string of flowers that would be placed on a white collar for a teacup poodle. “Promise me,” he said, “that you won’t put this on Baxy’s collar.”

“I promise.”

“So you like doing this?” Sebastian gestured with his hand at the dog accoutrements across the table.

“I don’t like it,” I said.

He looked at me, raised his eyebrows.

“I love it.”

Sebastian sighed. “I thought you were going to say that.”

“Why the disappointment?”

He breathed out heavily—not as weary as his sigh, but close.

“Seriously, Sebastian, what’s your problem with this?”

He shook his head.

“Really,” I said, “what is it?”

“No problem,” he said. He pulled his phone out of his pocket. “I’m going to call Paul, the producer, and I’m going to tell him to run the show.”

10

Later I would think about how my showing Sebastian my dogwear business convinced him to call his friend the news producer. Therefore, I realized, I had essentially started my own demise—the outing of the past Jess behind the present one.

But it wasn’t that first national news piece that did it. Destruction takes a little while.

The night Baxter was on the national news, a few days after the phone call, Sebastian dropped Baxter off because I needed him to try on dogwear.

“I’ll get him tomorrow afternoon,” Sebastian said.

“Sure. Thanks for doing this.”

“Sure,” he echoed.

Awkward silence seemed to course through the kitchen.

“So Baxter is on the news tonight.” I figured he’d remember, but I wanted to see his reaction.

His face was neutral. “Yeah. I’m going to be at my mom’s.”

“Tell her hi.”

Sebastian nodded.

I looked at my watch. “Damn, it’s on soon.”

He glanced at his phone then. “Shit.” He sighed. “My mom has all her sisters coming over.” Sebastian loved his four aunts, but they could be a lot to take when they were all together.

“That’ll be fun,” I said.

He groaned. “I’m so tired from writing all day. I just don’t know if I can handle the coven.” His mom had the maiden name of Carey, so the sisters called themselves Carey’s Coven.

“You can watch it here,” I said.

Pause. “Yeah?”

“Yeah.”

And so Sebastian and I watched the news piece together at my place, the place that had once been ours.

The last time we’d shared an evening in the condo, or at least attempted to share, was the night we got divorced. Neither of us wanted to be alone, but we didn’t want to be with anyone else, either. Our attorney had said it would be a simple matter. You’ll just step up to the bench and answer, “Yes.”

But the lawyer hadn’t told us, or maybe he hadn’t understood, how painful it was to hear a judge, in a bored tone, say, The spouses’ irreconcilable differences have caused an irretrievable breakdown of their marriage.

From the corner of my eye I’d seen something like a wince from Sebastian when the judge had said that. I’d looked over and saw he was squeezing his eyes shut. Sebastian, the man who didn’t close his eyes to combat and war and gruesome situations, had clamped his eyes shut, as if to ward off tears or pain.

But the anguish had kept coming as the judge had intoned, The court determines that efforts at reconciliation have failed.

I’d closed my eyes then, too, trying to stop the questions in my own voice streaming through my head—Did I make the best effort possible? Could we put it back together? Did we fail? Did I fail?

We’d both been shocked at how simple the proceedings ended up being, when nothing about our marriage had been simple.

But that night when Baxter was on the news, everything was just...lighter. Sebastian’s latest article, a piece on militias in Libya, had just released, and the story garnered raves and much attention, making him relaxed, open. And I was certainly in a much better mood than the night we got divorced. And then there was our little boy—our Baxy—on TV, bounding across a street and saving a little girl in a yellow dress.

Clara’s mom was interviewed, holding Clara on her lap.

“Oh, watch this,” I said, nudging Sebastian on the couch next to me. I lifted one of Baxter’s paws and pointed it at the TV. “Watch, Baxy. They’re talking about you.”

As usual, Baxter registered little through the television.

The correspondent had arranged, toward the end of Clara’s interview, for Baxter to surprise her and her mom. When the door opened and Baxter bounded through it to Clara, she shrieked happily and laughed with delight, wrapping her arms around Baxy. I couldn’t imagine any viewer being unmoved. “Look at you, good dog!” Sebastian said, as Baxter bounced from my lap to his, panting with apparent delight at his parents sitting next to each other, happy.

“And hey, Jess, there you are,” Sebastian said. He looked at me. “You didn’t tell me they interviewed you.”

“I wasn’t sure you’d like it.”

“As long as they don’t ask to interview me.”

He looked back at the TV, listening to the correspondent’s voice-over. Jessica Champlin, Baxter’s owner, was surprised the star-studded collar she created for her dog would get such attention.

Then my voice on TV saying, “I’ve gotten orders from around the country for the collars and leashes.”

Sebastian held his hand up for me to high-five.

The news segment ended with a shot of Clara and Baxter, as she kissed his head. Then the screen flashed to that moment when Baxy tackled her, when the truck swerved around the corner.

“Well,” the newscaster said. “That’s something you don’t see every day.”

“Although we wish we did,” his co-anchor said.

Sebastian patted my leg as the news rolled into a segment about taxes. I muted the TV and almost immediately a series of low ding, ding, ding sounds came from my phone. I picked it up.

“I have thirty-four new emails,” I said. Ding, ding, ding. “And fifteen texts.”

“Really?” Sebastian moved closer to me. “Since when?”

In my in-box, there was a bevy of emails with similar subject lines—Want to buy a Collar. How can I place order? Saw your dog on the news. Want Superdog collar. Need Superdog Leash.

“A few minutes ago.”

Then it kept going—ding, ding, ding.

“There’s more,” I said, holding out the phone to show Sebastian. “A lot more.”

11

It was Victory, the politician, who really kicked my business of dog styling into gear. She’d seen the news, too. She texted me the next morning, saying that she was being photographed that very afternoon for a women’s magazine. Because the magazine hired a stylist, she hadn’t needed to call me.

What’s the angle of the article? I wrote.

The piece dealt with fashionable, powerful women in state government. They wanted to shoot her in her office.

But since I saw your dog on the news, she wrote, I’m thinking we need a shot w/me and dog.

Projects authority, I wrote.

Right.

If you can master dog, you can master the country.

Exactly!

But also shows warmth.

I need warmth! Victory wrote. We’ve pushed ballbuster image pretty far.

A few minutes went by, then Victory texted, The magazine loves the idea of the dog in the shoot! Calling you...

“You know, it’s hard being a black politician,” Victory said when I answered. She rarely made use of hellos, something I liked about her, and she nearly always said something random without explanation. “Do you think DeeDee needs a bath?” she asked.

“Everyone needs a blow out,” I said. “When was the last time she was groomed?”

“Two months.”

“Then for a photo shoot? It’s time.”

“Any chance I can hire you to style her?” Victory asked.

I thought about the work in the office, much of it buried under boxes of materials that had arrived just an hour before. Still, this was exactly the kind of thing I wanted to stay open to. It was, I realized, the exact kind of work I wanted to expand into. Dog styling—probably not much work out there but even less competition.

“Absolutely,” I said to Victory. “I’ll find a grooming appointment. And I’ll pick her up.”

“God love you. And however you want her fur to look is good for me,” Victory said. “I’ll pay you your usual.”

“Sounds good,” I said. “What is Dee wearing?”

“Wearing? Like her collar? It’s the same one you saw last year.”

“The olive green one?”

“Yeah. It’s cute, right?”

“I think you want her to show a little sass.”

“Good point,” Victory said. “What’s your thought?”

I’d been sitting at the kitchen table, but I stood and headed for the office. “Do you see her in a baby-pink?”

“No,” Victory said. “I can’t look like a socialite with a purse dog.”

“One that’s already called DeeDee.”

“Precisely,” she said.

“Got it.” I picked up a few more things. “I’ll have options.”

We hung up, and I lifted a purple canvas strap with lime-green trim.

By the time I got to the photo shoot that afternoon, I’d made a few other collars and harnesses. As they were styling Victory’s office, I showed her the various collars I’d made or brought.

Melody, Victory’s thirteen-year-old, came home from school and helped us narrow the collars down further to the preppy purple-and-green one and a playful lavender one with white suns. We put both of them on DeeDee.

“Notice what you’re wearing?” I pointed to Victory’s own wrist, where she wore a watch and a bracelet. “The two at once?”

Victory looked down. “They look good together.”

“Right,” I said. “So do hers. Let’s leave her in both collars.”

“Yeah!” Victory’s daughter said, and snapped a photo. “I’m posting this.”

“You know she has more followers than I do?” Victory said as we walked DeeDee to the set.

“Your daughter? How is that possible?”

“She’s in this youth choir that has played all over the country. She drives traffic to me.”

The photographer liked the two collars, liked the texture and color it leant the photo.

Victory’s daughter took another picture during the photo shoot.

My dog, Dee Dee, is so cool, the Tweet said. She’s Superdog #2, then just #Superdog.

That photo and the comments were reTweeted by Melody’s friends and Victory and her followers, and then the hashtag Superdog started getting repeated, which just fueled the story. Pet owners raced to post a pic of their own pup so they could claim to be something like Superdog #87. Or Superdog #114. Always they ended it simply #Superdog. Quickly the race ramped up and people were bragging that their dog was in the top thousand, then the top ten thousand. Soon, #Superdog was trending again.

It multiplied and multiplied. And multiplied. And, at least for a while, I felt very, very alive.

Конец ознакомительного фрагмента.

Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес».

Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию на ЛитРес.

Безопасно оплатить книгу можно банковской картой Visa, MasterCard, Maestro, со счета мобильного телефона, с платежного терминала, в салоне МТС или Связной, через PayPal, WebMoney, Яндекс.Деньги, QIWI Кошелек, бонусными картами или другим удобным Вам способом.