The sounds of two dozen people scouring the woods outside his house provided a strangely soothing backdrop to his own part of the search, which was to turn over any large log and rip out any oversize brush that might have accidentally trapped her. He knew it was dangerous to undergo that kind of exertion without Bubbles there to make sure his blood sugar levels were stable, but that was sort of the whole point, wasn’t it?

He couldn’t do this without her. Not anymore. Somewhere in the past few weeks, he’d realized that the one-man approach to living wasn’t the way he wanted to go about things.

He wasn’t infallible. He wasn’t an island. He was just a man, and he wanted his puppy back.

He wanted his puppy and Sophie back. He just had to find a way to get to them first.

“Oh. Um. Hello, Harry.”

Harrison stepped out from behind a tree to find his mother sitting on a fallen log, her legs extended out in front of her and a bag of trail mix in her hand. To all appearances, she looked like a person without a care in the world.

Which, he guessed, was exactly what she was. She might have come at Sophie’s mom’s bidding—because, really, who could say no to that woman?—but she had no emotional investment in the outcome. She’d never had any emotional investment where her only son was concerned.

“Do you need to take a break?” he asked. As usual, his voice came out rougher than he intended, but he didn’t know how to stop it. “If you’re not feeling up to the search, you can head back to the house and we can reassign your section to someone else.”

Minerva hopped to her feet and tucked her snack out of sight. “I’m fine. I was just catching my breath, that’s all.”

“It’s okay if you need a rest,” he said with a complete absence of irony. It may have taken a tiny puppy and a woman with a heart of steel to teach him that, but he’d learned his lesson. “The search isn’t worth risking your own health.”

“Thank you,” she replied, equally unironically. “It’s taken a lot more out of me than I expected, that’s all. Being back here, seeing it again.”

His sympathies stopped there.

“I’ve missed it—these woods, this place.” His mom stopped. She must have seen the look on his face, because her voice quavered as she added, “You.”

“The first twenty-four hours are the most important,” he said, parroting his words from earlier that morning. He doubted that Bubbles was the real reason she’d come out here today, but he didn’t care. She was the reason he was here, and that was all that mattered. “We need to keep searching while the daylight lasts.”