“Good kid, that boy,” the man said, not dropping the Trevor thing. He tossed in a final bag of shavings and gave a determined pat on the side of the woman’s truck, indicating he was finished. She waved a thanks from inside the cab and pulled away.

“Yep,” Olivia agreed. Trevor was a good guy. She wouldn’t have been with him since her sophomore year of high school if he wasn’t. But him being a good guy didn’t mean it had been wrong to break off their engagement.

None of that was any of this man’s business. She held up the dangling leash in her hand. “Well, I guess I’d better make myself useful.”

He clasped her shoulder and gave a single nod. “You take care now, Ms. Graham. I’ll let your grandpa know I saw you.”

Of course you will. Olivia resigned herself to checking in with her parents and grandparents soon and returned to the dog she’d been about to take out. She squatted to open the crate door and hooked on the leash. The dog was midsize and cute, some sort of Lab mix, mostly black with patches of white on her chest and back feet. The poor girl was shaking, and Olivia’s stomach twisted into a knot of sympathy. She didn’t know this dog’s story but had been told that while a few of the dogs and cats in the holding area had been dropped off by flooded-out owners, most had been found roaming loose in town or walking up to people’s homes, driven to high ground this last week by the rising waters.

The rescue team, run by two middle-aged women named Rhonda and Karen, was posting pictures of each animal on social media and working with the police and animal control in an attempt to locate the owners. After seventy-two hours of being held but not claimed, the animals were listed as available for other rescues or foster groups to request.

“Come on, girl.” Olivia tugged on the hood of her jacket and headed out into the light rain after cajoling the hesitant dog out from under the shelter of the metal roof. “It’s not raining that hard.”

From the dog’s glossy coat to the way she meandered around patches of standing water, Olivia suspected she’d been an inside dog. She wanted to know if the dog had been surrendered or found roaming the streets, but there were more than twenty dogs and cats in the shed, and Rhonda and Karen were clearly inundated with coordinating the different parts of this rescue effort.