Page 84 of Lethal in Pink

She responds with a middle finger emoji. I pocket the phone, start the engine, and drive home with the windows down, letting the warm late September air fill the car—a city that suddenly feels less like a temporary stop and more like a home.

Chapter twenty-nine

Amiyah

The metal stool under my thighs has gone from cold to warm, which means I’ve been sitting here for at least twenty minutes. My pink-tabbed mock trial binder sits open on the counter, the pages untouched. My Beaned & Brew’d cup is beside it, the paper sweating a ring of condensation onto the laminate.

Jae pulled the stool out without looking when I walked in—his hand just reached behind him, fingers closing around the chrome seat, dragging it from under the counter with a smooth, practiced motion while he was already crouching in front of the second row of kennels. He didn’t turn. Didn’t ask. Just knew I was there and made space, the way he’s been doing for weeks now.

I watch his back.

He’s crouched in front of the far kennel, his shoulders curved forward, one hand flat on the floor. The dog inside is a small, trembling mutt with wiry brown fur and ears that fold unevenly at the tips. Something with terrier in it, maybe some dachshund. Its ribs show through the fur in sharp, shallow waves every time it breathes. The ID tag clipped to the wire door reads RESCUE / INTAKE / NO HISTORY.

Jae doesn’t extend his hand. He doesn’t coax or sweet-talk. He just keeps his palm flat on the linoleum, three inches from the threshold of the kennel, and waits.

His breathing is slow. Measured.

Ten minutes pass. The clinic settles into the steady, white-noise hum of the HVAC and the muffled clatter of someone breaking down prep trays in the back. I take a sip of my latte. It’s ice-cold.

The dog shifts.

A single, cautious movement—its front paw sliding half an inch across the fleece bedding. Then nothing for another full minute. Then the nose. A wet, dark point emerging from the shadow of the kennel, trembling, inching forward until it touches the center of Jae’s palm.

He’s not moving. He doesn’t flinch or celebrate or make a sound. He just shifts his weight slightly, angling his body to give the dog a clearer line of retreat, and murmurs something so low I can’t catch the words. His voice drops into a register I’ve only heard a handful of times—soft, graveled, stripped of every defense he carries through the rest of his life.

The dog presses its nose harder against his skin. A full breath. Then withdraws, collapsing back into the far corner of the kennel with its chin on its paws.

Jae stands up in one fluid motion, knees popping softly. He brushes his palms against his scrubs and turns toward the supply cabinet.

“His name’s probably not actually Tater,” he says, pulling a fresh roll of gauze from the shelf. “The intake form says ‘No Name Provided,’ but the foster wrote ‘Tater’ in the notes, so. That’s what we’re going with until someone corrects the record.”

“Tater’s a solid name,” I say, capping my highlighter. “Better than whatever the shelter database would generate. They’d probably call him something bleak like ‘Rescue Terrier Mix #472.’”

He snorts, tearing a strip of gauze with his teeth. “Rescue Terrier Mix #472 has trust issues and a calcium deficiency. I ran bloodwork this morning. His levels are absolute garbage.”

“Can you fix it?”

“We can try.” He folds the gauze into a neat square. “Diet change, supplements, time.”

This is the damn rhythm now. I show up with my binders and a coffee I don’t really need. He works. We talk in the gaps between his tasks—me perched on the chrome stool with my legs crossed at the ankle, him moving between kennels and exam tables with the loose, efficient grace of someone who belongs exactly where he is.

He reaches for a fresh pair of gloves from the wall dispenser, snapping the latex tight around his wrists with a sharp, percussive crack.

“Your bedside manner is truly something to behold,” I say dryly. “Very reassuring. The gauze-tearing really sells the compassionate care angle.”

Jae doesn’t look up as he adjusts the cuffs. “The dog doesn’t care about bedside manner,” he says, his voice level. “The dog cares if you’re scared. If your hands shake. If your voice has that particular pitch people use when they’re lying about how bad something is.” He tosses the empty wrapper into the bin, turning toward the sink to scrub up before his next check. “Animals don’t speak English, hotshot. They read body language. So if you’re terrified, they’re terrified. It’s that simple.”

I close my binder. The pink tabs catch the light, a neat gradient of color I spent twenty minutes organizing this morning for a mock trial I haven’t given a shit about in the last hour.

He’s right. Fear is chemical. It transmits. The body knows what the mouth hides.

I spent forty-five minutes in a room that smells like antiseptic and wet dog, watching a man crouch on a linoleum floor, and I didn’t open a single page of tort law.

I don’t feel bad about it. Not even a little fucking bit.

By October, the clinic gives way to sun-baked asphalt and the hum of Thornfield Hall with the windows cranked open against the persistent Southern California heat.

The barista at Beaned & Brew’d already knows the routine. She starts Jae’s large dark roast before he hits the counter—no room, paper cup thin enough for the heat to bleed through—while my iced latte with coconut milk materializes beside it thirty seconds later, condensation beading down the plastic. We grab our drinks without a word, shoulder to shoulder in the morning crush, slipping away toward the second-floor alcove behind the bound legal journals.