“You’re up early,” I greeted Cady before she could aim those same words at me. “One last training session?”

Cady had Pad on a lead, which I took to mean that my foster mother had already laid a scent path that our resident overachiever was following. Most dogs were either trained in air scenting, like Saskia, or in a method that focused more directly on retracing the target’s progression. Pad could switch back and forth between air scenting to cover a large area, and trailing, following a specific scent path across any and all terrain.

The army would have uses for both.

“You eat anything this morning?” Cady finished playing with Saskia and turned her eagle-eyed attention to me.

I shrugged.

“That would be a no, then.” Cady produced a PowerBar seemingly out of thin air and tossed it to me.

My hand whipped up to catch it. “Eat,” I ordered in unison with Cady, mimicking her no-nonsense tone almost exactly.

The edges of Cady’s lips twitched as she stifled a smile. “Is that your way of telling me I’m predictable?”

I shrugged again, but I didn’t bother biting back my own grin.

“I’m your mother,” Cady retorted. “I’m allowed to feed you. I’m also allowed,” she emphasized, “to tell you that I heard there was a party last night up on Hangman’s Ridge.”

Cady had a sixth sense that let her read animals with impressive accuracy. Unfortunately for Jude and me, that knack seemed to extend to her children as well.

Luckily, I had a better poker face than Jude did. “We went. We partied. We came home.” I preempted Cady’s next question. “We behaved ourselves, and Free left when Jude and I did. Happy?”

Cady reached out to push a piece of flyaway hair back from my face. “Ecstatic.”

I leaned into her touch for a moment before pulling back, and Cady let me eat the rest of my PowerBar in peace. Some people found my capacity for silence off-putting, like the act of not chitchatting was the equivalent of spitting in another person’s face. Cady never seemed to mind. She’d fought long and hard to give me back my voice, but she never acted entitled to my words.

If I’d stood there in silence for ten minutes, she would have stood there with me.

“Free was asking me if you’d decided to let the military have Pad,” I said as I swallowed the rest of the PowerBar and let Saskia lick my fingers for crumbs.

“Free can woman up and ask me herself,” Cady responded, in a tone that made it crystal clear that our neighbor wasn’t off the hook for skipping finals yet.