The pink-and-yellow sun did wonders to calm their nerves. As did having a task to concentrate on.

“Thirty miles is nothing up here. It’s the equivalent of the corner store back home,” he said, handing her a plate of toast and glass of orange juice. She nibbled on a corner.

He hoped she hadn’t noticed him checking the lock on the door as he walked past it.

“Not many ratings, though. I don’t know,” she said, brow furrowed.

“I don’t think people up here give a crap about Yelp and all that nonsense.”

Andrew tucked into his eggs, slathering them with hot sauce.

“Well, it’s either this guy or a vet in New Hampshire. It looks like a county clinic. The drive would take about an hour.”

“I’ll stick to the one in Maine,” he said.

Buttons sat by the bed, looking up at them, waiting for scraps.

“Want some sausage?” Andrew said, barely above a whisper.

The dog waddled to his side of the bed.

“He heard that,” he said.

“Something has to be off with his hearing,” Kate said. She took a birdlike sip of her juice. “There’s no way he heard that last night and just decided not to react.”

Andrew gave Buttons a sausage and patted his head.

“No, you’re right. That was so loud, it was like someone had pressed their mouth against the screen and was shouting at us.”

What he didn’t want to say was that the sudden, shrill cry had frightened him so much, his balls had shriveled to raisins and still hadn’t gone back to normal. How had he not heard it the first time? Maybe he should get his hearing checked while he was out with Buttons.

Hearing issues aside, it had been terrifying. He’d snapped the lights on and they’d waited, holding one another, wondering when the next shriek would come. When he went to check the window, she’d pulled him back onto the bed. A very big part of him was grateful. It was a moment when he was supposed to be alpha male macho, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to see what was on the other side of the window.

So they’d sat quietly, minutes turning into an hour, finally allowing themselves to unclench, just a little. As dawn broke, Kate became fixated on the dog’s hearing and had been looking up places to take him ever since. She could get like that – obsessed with something to take her mind off what was really bugging her. Like the way she obsessed over those old movies.

“I’ll call when their office opens at nine,” Kate said. She set the toast aside and dove back into her tablet.

Andrew had decided he was going to skip his morning run today. Dashing around in the woods alone had lost a lot of its appeal.

“What are you looking for now?” he asked.