Chapter 21 #3
Anchor looked at Tobin like one of the victims she rescued on missions—like she’d been on the brink of sinking, and Tobin was there to pull her from the agitated waters. She quickly dipped her gaze.
Tobin watched her over the rim of her aviators, the puppies now crawling around her legs. Anchor looked tired. The oversized button-up shirt she wore this morning masked her figure, but Tobin thought she looked thinner than usual. Anchor had always been slight; she didn’t have weight to lose.
Tobin had liked Anchor from the start—there was something quietly compelling about her.
Though several years younger, Anchor carried a kind of wide-eyed innocence that tugged at Tobin’s protective instincts.
She knew Anchor had Devon—she’d met her a few times, and it was obvious the two were extraordinarily close— but something about Anchor always made Tobin feel protective, like a little sister who needed to be safeguarded from the world.
“Anchor, seriously. You’re not putting me out this morning. You can stop thanking me.” Tobin gave her an easy, deliberate smile. “I meant it when I told you to call me if you ever need help. I’ll help when and how I can—like today.”
Anchor looked like she might cry. Her face had gone blotchy, her jaw tight with emotion. She busied herself with the adoption paperwork, though Tobin knew she’d already arranged it. Twice.
Tobin stood and brushed the dirt from her black skinny jeans, to the chagrin of the puppies. They whined at the loss of her attention, pawing at her legs.
“Anchor,” Tobin said gently, “what’s wrong?”
Anchor swiped at her cheeks with the back of her hand, blinking hard. She refused to meet Tobin’s eyes. “It’s nothing.” She reached for the paperwork again, only to realize it was already perfect from her umpteenth round of anxious rearrangements. “Nothing…”
Tobin’s heart sank as she watched emotion claw its way to the surface in the young woman in front of her. “You’re clearly worried about something.”
She hesitated, unsure how far she could reasonably push Anchor.
She definitely considered the younger woman a friend—after all, they’d shared enough about their pasts over the years that it would be awkward if they weren’t.
But neither had the other on speed dial for emotional crises, and Tobin understood emotional privacy better than most.
Still, she couldn’t just let her suffer without at least offering a friendly ear.
“I don’t like seeing people I care about worry. So maybe try me? Sometimes just saying things out loud can trigger solutions you hadn’t considered before.”
Anchor sniffled and finally met her gaze, eyes heavy with defeat. “I’m losing the rescue.”
A new wave of color flushed Anchor’s milky complexion. “I… uh, we can’t take on any more rescues, and we’re already two months behind on several vendor payments. We haven’t received enough donations in the last six months to cover our vet and food bills.”
Tobin watched as Anchor let her legs give out into one of the folding chairs they’d unpacked earlier. A small, humiliated laugh slipped from her throat as she landed. “I’ve been trying to figure out how to come up with the money, but it just isn’t there.”
Tobin’s heart ached for her. She knew Anchor put her entire soul into the rescue, and that losing it would be another notch in the long history of loss she’d already endured.
Anchor had been orphaned young—her father, a professional yachtie, was tragically killed in a hurricane when she was still in diapers.
Her mom had passed more recently, though Tobin didn’t know the details—only that it had happened shortly before they met.
All that Tobin knew was that Anchor was alone, save for Devon, and her entire life revolved around the now-perilously floundering Fetch a Friend rescue.
“Oh, Anchor,” Tobin murmured. “I knew things were bad, but I didn’t realize they were… dire.”
Anchor looked at her, guilt and regret etched across her features. “How long do we have?”
Anchor hunched her shoulders inward, making herself as small as she could.
“Most of the vendors have a 120-day grace period. And we’re halfway through some of them, so…
” Her eyes flicked upward as she thought, though Tobin suspected Anchor knew the exact hour everything would go irreparably south—she was nothing if not Type A.
“August,” she said quietly. “At the latest.”
Tobin ran her hands through her loose hair and sighed.
She could ask Eddie for a loan—or a donation.
Eddie would certainly provide some funding, but it would only buy them a few months and wouldn’t solve the rescue’s ongoing financial challenges.
Besides, she hated turning to Eddie for things like this.
Her best friend was overly generous with her assets, but Tobin never wanted money to come between them.
Everyone came to Eddie for money. And while Tobin knew that Eddie would readily give her whatever she asked for, she hated how dirty that made her feel.
She strived to protect the sanctity of their friendship, knowing Eddie was privately sensitive about why people were in her life.
Eddie never truly believed her relationships were genuine—that people were invested in her as much as they wanted her to literally invest in them.
Tobin sighed. She’d have to think it through. Maybe Harrow would have some ideas—from a legal angle.
“I’ll help however I can. Let me see if I can think of some quick options, and I’ll talk to some people—discreetly—to see if they have any ideas. My friend Eddie has a lot of contacts. So does my sister. Someone has to know something you haven’t thought of yet.”
Tobin watched as Anchor absorbed her words, a tentative flicker of hope settling in the ocean-blue shimmer of her eyes.
Anchor wiped the last of her tears away and replaced them with a determined smile. “Thank you, Tobin.”
Tobin nodded just as a group of kids ran up, dragging hesitant parents behind them. They knelt beside the playpen, wiggling their fingers through the grates as the puppies trampled over one another for attention.
“I don’t know what I’ll do if I have to close the rescue,” Anchor said, her voice quieting again. “This place is my home. It’s all I have.” “That’s hardly true, Anchor. You have Devon, and me. And all
the volunteers.” Tobin gave her a warm smile. “Fetch a Friend is more than a pet rescue—it’s rescued a few humans along the way, too. It’s your found family. And family sticks around, even if the home crumbles. We’ll figure something out.”
They didn’t have time to say much more after that. Hordes of families came and went through the farmer’s market, everyone in good spirits as they perused vendor stalls, sipped their drinks, and nibbled on an assortment of snacks.
Tobin was finishing the adoption paperwork for one of the three- month-old puppies when she was struck by the familiar, soothing scent of patchouli and musk.
Her head lifted from the clipboard. Grier stood at the booth across from theirs, leaning casually against a whiskey barrel table.
She was watching with an adoring grin—one that reached her eyes and sparkled, even from twenty feet away.
Grier mouthed a silent hi and widened her smile, the single dimple on the left side of her mouth appearing like punctuation to the moment. Tobin’s heart doubled its pace, her own smile spreading before she could stop it.
Someone approached from behind, standing just a little too close—close enough for Tobin to know it wasn’t Anchor. Devon had arrived.
“Someone is making puppy-dog eyes at you,” Devon murmured, “and it isn’t one of our dogs.”
Tobin tried to mask the warmth rushing through her at the rather crass comment, though a part of her secretly relished being the object of Grier’s apparently obvious admiration. She decided not to take the bait; Devon had few boundaries, and the ones she did have were thinly veiled.
“Hi, Devon. Glad you made it.”
“What, not even going to acknowledge that bodacious hottie who’s been making heart-eyes since she moseyed up to that barrel a solid four minutes ago?” Devon looked at her with an unabashedly mischievous gleam in her eyes.
Tobin refused to look at Grier, despite the magnetic pull of those so-called heart eyes. She was still trying to extricate herself from Devon’s perceptive interrogation without dragging Grier into it.
Instead, she dramatically placed the pads of all five fingers on the clipboard and slid the papers toward Devon. “This,” she said, “is for Cake.”
She nodded toward the newly named pup sitting alone in the corner of the pen, now wearing the confetti collar his new family had picked out. “They’ll be back in about thirty minutes to pick him up. He’s all yours until then.”
Devon stared at her as she began gathering her things. Tobin didn’t miss the way Devon’s gaze swung between her and Grier, tracking their energy with laser precision. Devon was nothing if not meddlesome—and there was no way she was letting this go.
Tobin waved to Anchor as she found her phone and jacket by the table. “I’m heading out. I’ll let you know if I come up with any ideas, okay?”
Anchor waved goodbye from inside the puppy pen while refilling water bowls. “Thanks again, Tobin. Enjoy the rest of your day!”
Tobin walked past Devon, who was still seated at the table. She raised her aviators to perch them atop her head—and couldn’t help but wink at Devon as she did.
Then she crossed through the crowd and right up to Grier, who greeted her with a full-body hug and a heated kiss that landed just this side of decent.
“I know it’s only been, like, forty-eight hours since I saw you,” Tobin said with a smirk, “but would you believe that I missed you?” She had no intention of releasing Grier from her arms. The shorter woman just seemed to fit there—curve for curve, their bodies joining like nesting dolls.
And she wasn’t lying about missing her.