It turned out that she and Lillian wore the same shoe size, and Morgan lent her a Seal Cove Veterinary polo that she shoved into her jeans in a French tuck. Morgan’s shoulders were significantly broader than hers, and the shirt hung off her. Not that it mattered how she looked, she reminded herself, but focusing on her clothing felt safer than thinking about what lay ahead.

She refused to let Morgan kick Stevie out of the front passenger seat. Instead, she rode in the back with a confused Nell. Kraken remained behind with Lillian and Angie. The shirt smelled like Morgan’s detergent, and she stopped herself with difficulty from burying her face in the sleeve while Stevie fiddled with the radio as they drove down country roads lined with forests and fields. She caught Morgan watching her in the mirror more than once and took comfort in those steady blue-gray eyes.

I’m a doctor, she told herself as they drove. This is my job. Nothing to panic about.

Panic, however, was determined to have its say. Her last work memory pounced. Pushing the bright pink Euthansol. The phone call. Her father’s death, and the sense, illogical but irrepressible, that she had somehow caused it, as if all the death in her wake had added up to that moment. What a waste of life. What a waste of a fucking life.

It had never mattered that if it hadn’t been her pushing the drug it would have been someone else, or that the people working at the shelters did their best to find homes for all their animals, even if it meant filling their own homes with more animals than they could afford. It had never mattered because everyone who had warned her against the field had been right; she hadn’t been cut out for shelter medicine. She couldn’t detach, and so her brain had done it for her, but it had taken things several steps too far—severing instead of shielding. Would things have been different if she had gone into general practice? Would she have still burnt out only a few years out of school?

Think of this as a ride-along, she tried to tell herself. She’d done plenty as a student. This could be a litmus test for how she was feeling toward work. It had nothing to do with the job opening at Seal Cove.

That last thought froze her. She sat, her hand tight around Nell’s collar, as she weighed the implications of even considering what that could mean.

“I haven’t had a ride-along in a while,” Morgan said from the front seat. “Last one was a vet student on summer vacation.”