Chapter Ten
CLAIRE'S NAME LIT PAIGE'S phone at nine on Thursday night, and Paige answered before the second ring. She’d been on alert for a phone call for hours with the severity of the storm and the age of the shelter building.
Warnings had run across the television all evening, straight-line winds and flash flood watches across three counties, with rain hammering the Templeton house hard enough to rattle the gutters.
Paige had made tea she didn't drink and half-watched the weather crawl along the bottom of the screen while some animal part of her had stayed tuned to the storm, uneasy on behalf of a place full of living things under an old roof.
When the phone rang, she was already braced for it, though bracing didn't make the words easier.
"The roof came down."
Paige was already standing. "Which roof. Claire, which section."
"The east runs. The corner Maddox flagged a couple of weeks ago. He noticed it when he was in Skipper’s kennel with him. I should have followed up on the engineer he recommended, but time and funds are both in short supply."
“He noticed a problem with the roof?”
“Yeah.” Wind roared behind Claire's voice, and under it the sound of dogs, a lot of dogs, frantically barking and whining.
"It took part of the intact wing with it when it went.
Water's coming into the main kennel room.
I have thirty animals to move in the next hour and nowhere to put them.
The emergency boarders are full. So are the vet clinics.
Half the county's flooding, Paige. I don't have anywhere to take them. "
Paige had her coat on already. "I'm coming. You need to get the ones nearest the water into crates first."
She was in the car with the wipers losing to the rain before she let herself turn to the thought she'd avoided since Claire named the corner Maddox had flagged.
That was Skipper's old kennel. The section that came down was the run the old dog had lived in for more than a year, the run he'd still be in, unadopted, too scarred for anyone to want, if Maddox hadn't sat on the concrete floor for four shifts and taken him home days before.
She gripped the wheel and made herself focus on the present, but the awareness crept in that Skipper could have died tonight. If not for the adoption, Skipper would likely still have occupied that run. Nobody had knowingly left him in danger, but the storm had beaten the reassessment.
She let herself finish the thought once, in the dark, with the rain coming sideways across the county road, and then she forced her attention back to the road.
Skipper was with Maddox in his home, maybe sleeping on that white sofa.
Skipper was fine. Whatever else this night held, the ugliest dog in the county was warm, dry, and safe because a man she'd written off had chosen him days before the roof he lived under came down.
She would think about what that meant later.
Right now, there were thirty other animals and a corner open to the sky.
She was two miles from Harbor Street when she accepted she needed Maddox’s help.
Forgiveness had nothing to do with calling him, and she'd worked that out in the half-second before her thumb moved.
She wasn't reaching for the man who'd married her as a merger.
She needed the only person she knew who could put a roof over thirty animals in the next hour, and he was good at solving problems. It was the coldest, most practical decision she'd made all year.
It just happened to require her estranged husband. That was a negative, not a perk.
He answered on the first ring. "Paige." There was a hint of hope in his voice.
She refused to let herself respond to it.
"I need the development." No preamble. There wasn't time, and she didn't want to spend any of it explaining herself.
"The empty one. The apartments that aren't finished.
I have thirty animals, a collapsed roof, and nowhere in the county to put them, and you have an empty building with a roof that holds. "
"You have it," Maddox said without hesitation.
"Maddox, I haven't explained—"
"You don't have to." She heard him already moving. "Utilities are shut off out there, but I can have them on in forty minutes. I can get the heat running too. I'll call the site manager and the local crew to get bodies and trucks moving. Are you at the shelter yet?"
"Almost."
"Then I'll meet you there. You need help before you move animals in this, or you'll lose one in the dark. Give me thirty minutes to get people rolling. Then I'm on my way to you."
The line went dead before she could thank him. She wondered if he'd hung up so she wouldn't have to, so the thing wouldn't become a moment he could bank. She hadn't expected him to make the call easier for her, and she didn't have time to examine what that did to her.
Harbor Street was full of chaos and water.
Claire and two other volunteers were hauling crates through ankle-deep runoff, and the east end of the building sagged open to the sky where the corner had gone, rain sheeting through onto concrete that used to be a kennel row.
Paige waded in and got to work. The next hour disappeared into helping frightened dogs, yowling cats, and whimpering puppies, passed hand to hand down a line of soaked volunteers.
She lost track of Maddox's timeline in the work.
She stopped a border collie from bolting through the open wall before carrying a senior cat in a pillowcase because the last carrier was full.
She held a flashlight in her teeth while Claire coaxed a terrified pit bull out of the run nearest the collapse, water rising over their boots.
The smell of wet concrete and fear was thick enough to taste.
A puppy screamed the whole time she carried it, a thin unbroken sound that stayed in her ears for an hour. There was no room in any of it for the man she'd called. Only the next crate, the next animal, and the water that kept coming.
Then the trucks came.
Caldwell trucks came out of the storm. Men in rain gear climbed out behind a site manager. Maddox was among them in a jacket already soaked through, and he didn't come to Paige first. He went to Claire, because Claire was running the evacuation, and asked what she needed. Then he did exactly that.
When she had a spare moment here and there, Paige watched him haul crates in the rain like any other body on the line, without drawing attention to himself.
There was no press and no moment engineered for her to witness.
The development opened its doors twenty minutes later, utilities humming, with heat pushing back the cold.
They were eventually all settled in a dry unfinished lobby filled with crates, blankets, the smell of wet animal, and the enormous relief of walls that held over their heads while the storm kept hammering the glass.
She found him near midnight in the half-finished lobby, both of them soaked.
There was a a shivering terrier mix asleep against his chest inside his ruined jacket, and the sight of that tenderness brought a lump to her throat.
She couldn’t pretend he’d snatched up the dog at seeing her coming to stage the moment.
He’d already been holding the dog when she came up behind him.
Everything he was doing was him, for the animals.
Nothing about his help gave her room to dismiss it as performance.
The money had shown up as labor, in the middle of her flooded world, and she couldn't call it a campaign, because he'd worked without asking her to watch or praise him, and the only witnesses tonight were soaked volunteers and frightened animals.
Around them the lobby had turned into a makeshift shelter, with crates stacked two high along the drywall, blankets from the trucks spread over concrete, and volunteers and the Caldwell crew moving among the animals briskly.
Claire moved down a row of crates with a clipboard, counting heads, and her count came out right.
Every animal accounted for. Nobody lost in the dark.
Paige knew it was rare that it had worked out that way, and it hadn't happened by luck.
"Thank you," she said after clearing her throat, and this time, he couldn't hang up to stop her.
"You'd have found another way." He shifted the terrier higher against his chest, careful not to wake it. "You always do."
"Not by midnight, and not with somewhere warm and dry to put them.
" She made herself say the rest, because it was true, and she was done pretending things weren't true to protect her position.
"They'd have been in carriers in the rain in a parking lot, covered by tarps.
Some of them probably wouldn't have made it. You know that as well as I do."
He didn't argue and didn't preen. He held the dog and accepted the truth without claiming credit for it, which was its own kind of answer.
She looked around the lobby full of saved animals, and the man holding a stray inside his coat, and stopped fighting the fact of it.
He was changing, really changing, and she didn't know what it meant for her or for them.
It could only be positive for him, and she couldn't keep calling him the same man she’d left, because that version of him wouldn't have been standing in a flood at midnight with a terrier down his jacket, asking Claire what she needed and doing it.