Maybe nice, normal puppies liked to lie on their backs and have their tummies scratched. Agatha wasn’t nice or normal, which Trish didn’t seem capable of figuring out. Her necklace, which looked like a string of old-fashioned colored Christmas lights, swung forward when she finally set the puppy on the floor.

Agatha ran to Luke like a sprinter toward a finish line and gazed up at him. Lifting his eyebrows in challenge, he gazed back. She turned in a tight circle, lay down, and rested her chin on the toe of his boot.

“Aww,” said Finley and Trish in unison.

Could he file a complaint with the city, citing unacceptable work conditions? No employee should be expected to sacrifice his sleep to a puppy, then turn around and keep his foot stationary while on the job so that the same puppy could get quality rest.

Luke spent that evening the way he’d spent all his evenings since they’d forced Agatha on him—going down his building’s elevator and escorting Agatha to a patch of grass, where she mostly failed to go to the bathroom. Going up his building’s elevator, then cleaning up the messes she made on his floor. He was on his hands and knees more than Cinderella.

“Doesn’t this kibble look amazing?” he asked the puppy, his big body once again crammed inside her pen. He placed several pieces of food in the palm of his hand and moved it back and forth in front of her hypnotically.

Hypnosis. Why hadn’t he thought of that before? He’d pay thousands for a dog hypnotist to straighten this animal out.

“You’re getting hungry.” He spoke in a relaxing hypnotist’s voice. “You want to eat kibble, like a regular dog. Yummy. Very, very yummy.”

To his astonishment, she stuck her nose close to the food.

He held perfectly still. “Yummy,” he repeated.

Finally, she took a few pieces, crunching it loudly and eating with her mouth open.

He felt like he’d won an Olympic medal. Grinning, he nodded encouragingly. “Yummy.”

She ate the rest of the food on his hand. He scooted her bowl toward her. “Well, go on. You’ve got a whole bowl there. Go to town.”

She simply stared at him meaningfully, waiting.

The fluff expected him to hand-feed her?

He put more food on his hand. She ate it. He kept trying to interest her in the bowl, and she kept refusing. He got up, grabbed a book, and placed it under her bowl, which brought the food up to the height of her chin.

She gave him another meaningful stare.

For the next ten minutes, he endured a cramp in his leg while he fed her small portions from his hand over and over.

When she’d finally had enough, she lay down on the floor, her expression unmistakable. It said, Gotcha.