“No car, she’s not here— Oh no.” He knelt beside me. The vomit was sparkling, shiny bits of colored foil reflecting light. Wrappers. “Chocolate,” he said.

I’d left my Easter basket on the table.

I choked back sobs and pressed my fingers through Terry’s scraggly fur to feel for a pulse in his neck. Sean listened near his snout.

“He’s breathing,” Sean said. “Barely.”

“We have to make him throw up again, how do we make him?”

“Here.” He tossed his phone to me. “Google it, I’m calling the vet.”

“The number is on the fridge.” One hand on Terry, the other thumb-typing, I called Francine first.

Where is she?

Her familiar ringtone (“White Christmas”—all year long) came from her phone on the sink beside the refrigerator. I Googled dog poisoned and read about pouring hydrogen peroxide and water down Terry Johnson’s throat.

“Are his gums gray?” Sean asked. “The vet says pull his upper lip back.”

Gray. I nodded through sobs.

“Okay,” he said, trying so hard to stay calm. “They say be really careful but pick him up, because we need to go. Now.”

“Terry, wake up….” My chest heaved. No car, how would we get to the vet? “Sean, call your mom!”

“Not home.”

“Kira!”

Sean scribbled a note to Francine and snatched a blanket from the couch, wrapped Terry Johnson like a baby, and three minutes later Kira barreled in a cloud of dust down the driveway in her mom’s car.

I held Terry Johnson on my lap in the blanket, and Kira blew through every stop sign and one red light. I jumped from the still-moving car to race through the doors of the only emergency vet on the island. I passed Terry with trembling arms in his blanket burrito to the waiting vet technicians, who rushed him away through swinging doors. I stood, all of me shaking now and breathing hard, until Sean and Kira were beside me.

“Sit,” Kira said, and Sean brought me a clipboard of paperwork to fill out: address, emergency contact, Terry Johnson’s age, his weight, last vaccines given.

“Dogs are so dumb,” Kira said, her hand on my knee. “But they have iron stomachs. My grandma’s dog ate a diet made almost exclusively of his own poop, and that guy lived to be fourteen. Terry Johnson will be fine. He will.”

Sean stood beside me, his hand stroking my hair. “Is that true?” he asked Kira.

“Mine, too,” the receptionist said, leaning over his desk to pass a box of Kleenex to Sean. “Upside is I never have to clean the yard; downside, you do not want her licking your face.”

“This is chocolate,” I sobbed. “It’s poison. I poisoned him.”

“So is poop,” the receptionist said. “If he was breathing—he was breathing, right?”

“Barely!”

“Takes a lot of chocolate to kill a dog. Try to relax.”

The door opened. Francine walked in, looked at me, and put her hand to her mouth. “Is he gone?”