What the Dog Knew

The dog died on a Tuesday, which felt like a cosmic joke. Barnaby had been dying for months anyway, his spine curled like a question mark, his breath whistling through lungs that had given up on the project of living. But the timing—the way his heart stopped just hours before David came home with lipstick on his collar—felt almost merciful.

Elise buried him under the oak tree where they'd first kissed, twelve years and three lifetimes ago. The ground was frozen, and she broke the shovel handle getting through the frost. She kept digging anyway. Some things required violence.

She met David at a financial firm where he'd been the office bull—charging through meetings, hoarding victories, goring anyone who questioned his spreadsheets. She'd been twenty-six and hungry for someone who seemed to know where he was going. He'd been thirty-four and convinced he was going somewhere important. They'd been wrong about both things.

The woman with the lipstick—twenty-three, gorgeous, terminally optimistic—called herself a fox. David had probably used the word first, slipping it into conversation the way he slipped everything everywhere. Elise had seen it coming. Hell, she'd almost helped.

"You're lonely, Dave," she'd said over dinner last month, pushing chicken around her plate. "You're eating yourself alive in that apartment."

"We're both lonely, El."

"I have Barnaby."

"The dog can't fix this."

But the dog had tried. Barnaby, with his arthritic loyalty and his refusal to stop greeting David at the door even after David stopped coming home at a reasonable hour. The dog had held together the crumbling architecture of their marriage with nothing but tail wags and that desperate, wet-nosed devotion that dogs somehow sustain even when they're dying inside.

Now Barnaby was gone. Elise smoothed the dirt over his grave and stood up, her back screaming. The house would be silent tonight. David would come home smelling of someone else's perfume. The lipstick stain on his collar would still be there because he was too arrogant to check, too careless to hide what he no longer cared to conceal.

But that was tomorrow's problem. Tonight, the earth was raw under her fingernails, and somewhere beyond the trees, the stars were doing their indifferent thing. Elise went inside and poured herself a drink. The silence felt almost like company.