Page 3 of Kid Gloves

"Lungs are clear. Eyes are good. This one's going to run a kingdom someday." She stands, strips her gloves, and looks at me the way medical professionals look at people who claim to be fine. "You should get checked."

"The clinic's forty minutes and my barn is still smoking."

"That's not a no."

"It's a Tuesday," I say, which isn't an answer, and she laughs, and something in it says we're going to be a problem for each other in the best way.

He's still here. That's the part I keep snagging on. The fire's out, his fence line is safe, every reasonable reason to be on my property expired hours ago, and Wade Mercer is still here, standing in the wet ash of my worst morning with his arms crossed, looking at the wreck of my kennel barn like it insulted his family personally.

"You'll need housing for the litter," he says. "Today."

"I'll figure it out."

"They're six weeks into a federal imprinting schedule."

"I know what week they're in. I built the schedule." It comes out sharper than he's earned, this specific man, on this specific morning, and I catch it and drag it back. "Sorry. I'll figure it out. I always figure it out."

He looks at me for a moment with those unreadable ledger-colored eyes, and I brace for the thing men like him say to women like me — something with little lady load-bearing in the middle of it.

"You got all nine out," he says instead. "Twelve-foot aisle, active fire. Alone." A pause, the length of a signature. "Noted."

Then he walks the fence line home, stepping over the wire like it's nothing, and I stand there in his jacket holding the word noted like an idiot holding a live coal, because it's the closest thing to a medal anyone's pinned on me in thirty-two years.

"Did you hear that?" I ask Brisket. "Noted. Man watches me lose everything I own and files a commendation."

Brisket has moved on to investigating the fire hose. One of the volunteers gently reclaims it. She lets him think it was his idea.

I should be planning. I should be on the phone. Instead I stand there another minute watching Wade Mercer get smaller against all that ruthless organized acreage, and I catalog the facts like he taught me an hour ago, because facts are a handrail: he came over the fence. He stayed six hours. He left the extinguisher.

He never once said I told you so about the wiring, and the certified-letter man I've been feuding with for two years absolutely would have.

File that under later, too.

The goats regroup around me. Brisket leans her whole criminal weight against my leg, and I do what I always do at the bottom of a hole, which is inventory the hole.

The barn, gone, and not just a barn, the barn, the one with Gran's height marks for every dog she ever raised penciled inside the tack room door, forty years of names and dates that are ash now, and I can't think about that yet, so I put it in the same place I put the smell from the north wall and the way Wade's pen slowed down. The equipment: crates, the good scale, the puppy obstacle set I built off a video, the washer that only I knew how to threaten into working. The feed, three weeks of it. The insurance deductible, which I know by heart the way other people know their kids' birthdays.

And the schedule. Because here's the part that turns my stomach in a way the flames didn't: those nine puppies aren't just mine to love, they're mine to deliver. Week six of a sixteen-week federal imprinting program, every day scripted — new surfaces, new sounds, new hands, all of it in a facility that meets standards I can recite in my sleep and currently do not have. Iron Creek's contract doesn't care that my barn is a ribcage. The government's timeline has never once cared about anybody's barn.

The mortgage is due on the first, same as always, sentimental about nothing.

"Okay," I tell Brisket, and my hand finds the warm space between her horns. "I can fix this."

The barn ticks and settles. Somewhere in the wreck, a rafter lets go.

"I cannot fix this."

Chapter 2

Wade

Clause 14(c).

It's 0500 Sunday and I've read it eleven times, like the words are going to rearrange themselves out of pity.

All whelping, imprinting, and early-development activities under this contract shall be conducted on secured premises meeting the physical-security standards of Section 8.

I wrote that clause. Fought for it, actually — sat across from a government lawyer for two hours arguing that if they wanted dogs worth eighty thousand dollars a head, the pipeline had to be protected from day one. Felt good about it. Felt smart.