Which was the only explanation he could offer for why his chest felt so hollow as he reached the kitchen to find the back door swung wide open. The faulty latch had struck once again, making the cracked linoleum feel like ice under his bare feet.

“This stupid fucking house!” he said, running to the open doorway and scanning the dimming darkness for any sign of Bubbles. He couldn’t see the puppy in the distance, but there were a few tiny footprints in the mud at the bottom of the steps that didn’t bode well for this adventure’s end. Given the size and scope of the land around the house, she could have gone anywhere. “My stupid fucking father!”

For twenty-two years, that man had frozen himself and his heart here. For twenty-two years, he refused to leave the only piece of his old life he had left. But he had left—and without so much as a backward glance at Harrison in the rearview mirror.

Just like his mom. Just like Sophie. And now, it seemed, just like Bubbles.

“No.”

Harrison wasn’t sure where the sudden resolution came from. Saying no had always come easy to him, but never like this. He normally said no to friendship and opportunity, to happiness and love. He said no to anything that threatened to shake him out of his comfortable misery.

This time, however, he was saying no to being left behind.

“I’m not letting you go without a fight,” he said to the empty kitchen. Which was just as well, because he wasn’t sure who he was talking to. “You don’t get to walk away without saying goodbye. You’re a part of me now.”

Despite the earliness—or lateness—of the hour, he grabbed his keys off the hook and shoved his feet into a pair of work boots by the back door. He had no idea where his puppy had gone or why, but he knew exactly who he could rely on to help find her.

She was determined and strong. She was resolute and insistent.

She was his whole fucking world, and it was about goddamn time he did something about it.

* * *

“She’s gone.”

Sophie awoke to find an unshaven, unkempt, and frantic man standing at the foot of her bed.

“I looked all over the house and the yard, but her footsteps stopped a few feet from the back door and I can’t find any other trace of her.”

She sat up, aware, as she did, that the flimsy camisole she’d worn to bed left little to the imagination. But her nipples peeking through the thin silk fabric seemed less important than the fact that Harrison Parks had somehow broken into her house.

“Harrison? What are you doing here? And how did you get in?”