been carefully and expensively repaired. The obvious abuse the animal suffered had not yet worked its way into his muscle memory. Whenever I put my hand to his face, the weight of his head fell into the palm of my hand.
I looked into the dog’s woeful eyes and my mind filled in details from this poor creature’s life. I had no way of knowing the truth, but my heart understood this was what had happened: He had not been abandoned. He had wandered off or slipped his leash. His owners had gone to the store or left for vacation and somehow—a gate accidentally left open, a fence jumped, a door left ajar by a well-meaning house-sitter—this beloved creature had found himself walking the streets with no sense of which direction would take him back home.
And a group of kids or an unspeakable monster or a combination of all had found this dog and turned him from an adored pet into a hunted beast.
Like my father, I have devoted my life to treating animals, but that was the first time I had ever made the connection between the horrible things people do to animals and the even more horrific things they do to other human beings.
Here was how a chain ripped flesh. Here was the damage wrought by kicking feet and punching fists. Here is what a human being looked like when they wandered off into a world that did not cherish them, did not love them, did not ever want them to go home.
Your mother was right.
The details tore me apart.
ONE
The downtown Atlanta restaurant was empty except for a lone businessman in a corner booth and a bartender who seemed to think he had mastered the art of flirty conversation. The pre-dinner rush was starting its slow wind-up. Cutlery and china clashed in the kitchen. The chef bellowed. A waiter huffed a laugh. The television over the bar offered a low, steady beat of bad news.
Claire Scott tried to ignore the endless drum of noise as she sat at the bar nursing her second club soda. Paul was ten minutes late. He was never late. He was usually ten minutes early. It was one of the things she teased him about but really needed him to do.
“Another?”
“Sure.” Claire smiled politely at the bartender. He had been trying to engage her from the moment she sat down. He was young and handsome, which should’ve been flattering but just made her feel old—not because she was ancient, but because she had noticed that the closer she got to forty, the more annoyed she was by people in their twenties. They were constantly making her think of sentences that began with “when I was your age.”
“Third one.” His voice took on a teasing tone as he refilled her glass of club soda. “You’re hittin’ ’em pretty hard.”
“Am I?”
He winked at her. “You let me know if you need a ride home.”
Claire laughed because it was easier than telling him to brush his hair out of his eyes and go back to college. She checked the time on her phone again. Paul was now twelve minutes late. She started catastrophizing: carjacking, hit by a bus, struck by a falling piece of airplane fuselage, abducted by a madman.
The front door opened, but it was a group of people, not Paul. They were all dressed in business casual, likely workers from the surrounding office buildings who wanted to grab an early drink before heading home to the suburbs and their parents’ basements.
“You been following this?” The bartender nodded toward the television.
“Not really,” Claire said, though of course she’d been following the story. You couldn’t turn on the TV without hearing about the missing teenage girl. Sixteen years old. White. Middle class. Very pretty. No one ever seemed quite as outraged when an ugly woman went missing.
“Tragic,” he said. “She’s so beautiful.”
Claire looked at her phone again. Paul was now thirteen minutes late. Today of all days. He was an architect, not a brain surgeon. There was no emergency so dire that he couldn’t take two seconds to text or give her a call.
She started spinning her wedding ring around her finger, which was a nervous habit she didn’t know she had until Paul had pointed it out to her. They had been arguing about something that had seemed desperately important to Claire at the time but now she couldn’t remember the topic or even when the argument had occurred. Last week? Last month? She had known