Fáton stood before the minister’s desk, his smile growing until it showed a row of small, even teeth.

“I’m glad we agree,” he said in an indulgent tone. “It seems to me we’ve made progress here today. And progress, Etienne, is always a delightful lift.”

The adoption center was at the end of a long dirt and gravel drive that led off the coiling two-lane blacktop between Pescadero Creek County Park and Portola State Park, a short fork in the road to the southwest. Julia Gordian considered herself fairly adept at following directions, but because the sign marking the drive was obscured by a thick outgrowth of oak and fir, she had missed it at first and had driven twenty minutes past her destination to the Pescadero Creek Park entrance. There a helpful ranger at the admissions gate had steered her back around, advising her to stay on the lookout for a PG&E roadside utility station about an eighth of a mile before the unpaved turnoff.

The utility station was nothing more than a green metal shed with a concrete apron that almost blended into the woods to the right, and Julia spotted it only at the last instant. But soon afterward she’d seen the sign with the wood-burned depiction of a greyhound on a rustic post amid the trees. She had swung her brand new Honda Passport onto the mostly uphill drive, muttering a stream of obscenities at the pebbles spitting up from under the vehicle’s tires to pop and rattle against its windows, and sparing some choice words for the jutting branches on either side as they raked across its shiny silver finish.

Julia drove slowly along. She had just strung together a phrase pairing synonyms for the excretory functions of various farm animals and a particularly objectionable sex act between human family members, when two buildings came into sight ahead of her—a small frame house with a neat lawn to her left and a flat-roofed prefabricated aluminum structure some yards beyond it. There were five greyhounds cavorting in a large pen behind the house. Two of them were fawn colored, two were roans, and the odd dog out was a tawny brindle. It hardly surprised Julia that none of the greyhounds were gray.

She rolled the Passport into a dusty, weed-smattered parking area by the prefab, cut the engine, grabbed her handbag off the passenger seat, strapped it over her shoulder, and got out. The plain metal sign above the building’s open door read:

PENINSULA GREYHOUND RESCUE
AND ADOPTION CENTER

As she started toward the building, a man in blue jeans, a plaid work shirt, and a baseball cap with a well broken-in bill appeared in its entrance, and then came down the two wide front doorsteps to greet her.

“Julia Gordian?” he said.

She nodded. “And you must be—”