“What I’ve done to you?” Oscar tsked gently and lowered himself into the nearest chair. It spoke volumes about their history together that he’d willingly put himself so close to a potential stabbing. “You mean when I called in a personal favor and laid out a huge chunk of my annual DNR budget to keep your sorry ass alive and on the job? You’re right. What was I thinking?”

It was a rhetorical question, so Harrison didn’t bother answering. The next question, however, was more pointed.

“Is that the infamous puppy?”

Harrison glanced down at Bubbles, who was showing signs of waking. It was always a production with her, her tiny limbs twitching, her tinier tongue stretching as she yawned. Awake she might be, but she wouldn’t move from his lap, that much he knew for sure. It was warm there, and the damn dog wouldn’t stop shivering.

And who could blame her? There was a faulty latch on the back door that caused it to swing open at the first sign of a gust of wind, so the blasted thing had been open half the night. The baseboard heaters were older than Harrison was, and the fireplace obviously wasn’t an option. He had no other choice.

“Bubbles, meet the man who betrayed me. Judas, meet the ferocious rescue puppy you’ve saddled me with for the rest of my life.”

“Aw, she’s a cute little thing, isn’t she?” Oscar said, ignoring Harrison’s commentary. He turned his attention to the project Harrison had laid out on the table. “Why are you cutting holes in your socks?”

He waved the scissors at Oscar. “If you know what’s good for you, you won’t ask that question.”

Oscar shrugged. “Suit yourself. Is Wallace around?”

“No, he went into town to run a few errands.”

“And by that, you mean he’s sitting alone at the bar in the bowling alley?”

Harrison glanced at the clock above the stove and snorted. “At eight thirty in the morning? Of course he is. The alternative is to sit around the house all day with me.”

Silence descended over the pair of them, broken only by the snuffling sounds of Bubbles coming to full awareness. It wasn’t an uncomfortable silence, but it was heavy. Long before Oscar had become his boss, he’d been his father’s best friend. He knew all of their secrets, all of their problems—including the toll a long period of enforced inactivity was having on a man like Wallace Parks. Without the promise of his job, his dad had nowhere to go, nothing to do, and no one to do it with. And for the first time in his long, miserable life, he was forced to realize it.

It was what made this whole you-can’t-come-back-to-work-until-you-get-a-service-dog thing so cruel. Oscar knew what kind of a toll it would have on Harrison too.