At home he carried his unopened presents into his bedroom and closed the door behind him. He didn’t slam it. That somehow hurt more. An eight-year-old should never feel responsible for hiding his sadness so his mother won’t worry.

I stood outside his room a long moment before going to the kitchen. The thank-you bags still covered the counter, each child’s name written by hand the night before — he’d rewritten Christopher’s tag three times because he kept reversing two letters.

The apartment should have smelled like pizza and birthday cake. Instead there was only cold winter air and stale morning coffee.

I opened my laptop.

Chapter 3 — The Dog Place

My name is Willa Embry. I was thirty-four, and I was the office manager at North Loop Veterinary Hospital in Minneapolis. Gage liked to call me “the receptionist at the dog place.”

The title never mattered much to me. The work did.