Summer leveled Joe with those deep jade eyes. “Am I right?”

“Yes,” Joe said, sorrow filling him at the pain this was going to cause all of them. “You’re right.”

Camille abruptly pushed up from the chair and walked out of the room without looking back.

Summer sighed and got to her feet as well but Kenny stepped in front of her. “Let me,” he murmured.

“Do you think she’ll talk to you?”

“I do, yes.”

“She’s even more stressed than I imagined,” Summer said when Kenny was gone, staring at the door. She set Ashes down and hugged herself in a gesture Joe wasn’t even sure she realized she made.

Socks appeared in the doorway and glared at the specimen of puppy.

Ashes let out one hopeful, excited bark.

“Ashes, sit. Stay,” Joe said firmly. “Stay.”

Ashes didn’t sit but she did stay, her entire body quivering with the effort to hold herself back. One small whine escaped her.

“Stay,” Joe said again softly.

Socks, not being under any orders but her own, walked into the room and right past Ashes.

Ashes barked again, and leaned in and licked Socks’s face. That proved too much for the cat, who hissed, which invited Ashes to bound after her.

Socks leapt over the backs of two chairs, jumped onto the table and off again in a single graceful bound. Ashes became a frantically barking mass of excitement, chasing the cat around the table in circles. They both vanished beneath the table, from which emerged more wild barking and ferocious growling.

“Goddamnit.” Joe dove beneath the table, snagged the puppy, and came face to face with Summer, who’d dived under the table from the other side to grab Socks.

“Your puppy is short on manners,” Summer said with a smile.

“You’re telling me?” The puppy licked Joe’s chin. “What am I going to do with you?”

“Keep her, of course.” Summer was close enough that if they hadn’t had the puppy and the pissed off cat between them, he might have been able to lean in and do something stupid.

Ashes did it for him. She craned her neck and licked Socks again. Socks retaliated by lifting a paw and bitchslapping the puppy across the face. Ashes yelped and Joe jumped, cracking his head hard on the underside of the table.

He swore at the cat, at the puppy, at Summer who was laughing at him as he backed out from beneath the table. He sat right on the floor while the stars cleared from his vision. “I’m beginning to see why that dog was at the pound.”

“You wouldn’t give her back.”

He rubbed his aching head. “In a heartbeat, I would.”

Summer kneeled in front of him and put her hands on his shoulders, peering into his pupils. “How many of me do you see?”