“It’s not getting better,” he said, his voice more frantic than he cared to admit. Since his version of frantic sounded more like anger, the words came out as an accusation. “I thought the extra training I was doing with her would help, and that the pouch was making a difference too, but look at her. She’s bound tight and still hates the flames.”

He paused, waiting for Sophie to wince or back away, but she didn’t. She stepped closer, drawing so near he could smell her, feel the residual heat from the fire rising up off her tight-fitting jacket. That small action, that step forward—toward him, to him—almost broke him. Nothing he seemed to say or do caused this woman to back away.

“Extra training?” she asked.

“It was nothing. Just some things she and I were trying together. I wanted to, uh… It sounds dumb now that I’m saying it, but…” He shrugged helplessly. “I wanted to make this work for you.”

There wasn’t much light this far from the campfire, but Sophie’s eyes opened so widely that they captured the full luminosity of the moon and flung it right at him.

He wasn’t sure what to make of that look—that shock—so he cleared his throat and kept going.

“Maybe you were wrong after all,” he said. “Maybe she can’t do this. I want her to succeed, I really do, but that was just one little crackle, one little flare. Do you have any idea how much worse it can get out there?”

“Harrison, stop.”

“You can’t make things happen just because you want them to,” he said. Now that the verbal floodgates had been opened, he didn’t seem to know how to close them again. All the anxiety of the past month, all the worries and agonies and inadequacies, seemed to be tumbling out of him at once. “I know it makes me an asshole to say it, but one of us has to. She’s not fit for the job, and no number of candles and camping trips are going to change that. Working around fires will end up hurting her. I will end up hurting her.”

“Harrison, listen.”

“I can’t, Sophie,” he said—pleaded, really. How could he reasonably be expected to drag the poor puppy out into the wild like this? What kind of a man would he have to be to subject her to this kind of whimpering agony day after day? “I’d like to keep her if I can, maybe as a pet, but—”

“For the love of all things stubborn, will you stop talking for five seconds and look at her?”