Page 174 of 10 Rings I Hate About You
Chaos stepped out the second the crate door was open, and I clipped his leash to his collar. On a nearby table, there was a basket of snacks. After arming myself with enough to keep Chaos occupied, Marc handed over a lead apron for me to wear.
“Stay still,” Marc told Chaos in a firm voice.
Chaos chewed on his snack as Marc took a few shots of Chaos’s stomach. Once finished, I kissed Chaos on the top of his head and guided him back into his crate. He yawned as though he was bored with us, curled up on his cot, and fell asleep.
Marc hooked the machine up to his laptop in the next room, and I sat beside him, watching him scroll through the images with a focus that I recognized. A muscle ticked in his jaw, and the furrow between his brows deepened.
“I don’t see anything,” he said finally. “But I might not have caught it at this stage. I’m going to email these to a radiologist friend and see if they notice anything in the photos I might be missing.”
I nodded. “What do we do in the meantime?”
He sighed. “In the meantime, we watch him. If he shows any signs of distress overnight, we bring him in for surgery first thing. I have a good friend who's a livestock vet—she’ll see him.”
I moved to him, wrapping my arms around his waist from behind, pressing my face between his shoulder blades. I felt the breath he let out—long and slow, the kind that carries weight. “Chaos will be fine,” I said into the fabric of his shirt. “He’s made it this far. Before you, he didn’t have anyone, and who knows what he ate while roaming Rhode Island. He’s got both of us to look out for him now.”
Marc’s hand came up to cover mine. “ If something happens to him?—”
“It won’t,” I said softly, and held on.
He turned and eventually rested his chin on top of my head. We stood there for a moment in the quiet of the room with only the low hum of the laptop for a soundtrack; the reassuring stillness of a house at three-thirty in the morning. I thought how strange it was and how right it felt to be sharing this worry about this specific goat with this specific man.
I had not seen this version of my life coming, and I loved it for what it was.
He nodded. “While he’s quiet, we should clean up the entry way and try to find the other ring.”
An hour later, the entry way was set to rights, but the ring was still nowhere to be found, so it was looking more and more likely that Chaos really had eaten it. “Why don’t I make us a snack and get drinks while you go sit with him?” I suggested.
“You should get some rest. There’s no reason for the two of us to not sleep.”
I scoffed. “You can’t get rid of me that easily. I’m in this for the good and the bad, Kingsley. Now go watch our baby.”
He laughed and pulled me close. His lips rested on my temple for a quick kiss before he let go. “Okay. Thank you.”
I quickly put together a charcuterie board as he headed to Chaos’s room to begin his watch duty. I arranged the meats, cheeses, and fruit with more care than strictly necessary, along with water and wine, because we needed both, then carried everything to Chaos’s room.
As I neared the bedroom door, I overheard Marc talking to the goat. “You can’t keep doing stuff like this. You have people that worry about you now.”
I peeked into the room. Chaos snuffled his nose against Marc’s outstretched hand. I stood watching them for a moment longer, my heart fluttering at the sweet sight of them together. “Hey, boys,” I greeted, keeping my voice soft so I didn’t startle either of them.
We settled in together—Marc’s back against the wall, Chaos deeply unrepentant lying across his legs, and me tucked into Marc’s side with the charcuterie board within reach. Marc fed Chaos the occasional approved snack with the resigned affection of a man who had lost the battle of staying distant and was all in. I fed Marc between sips of wine, his lips closing around my fingers with a distracted warmth that made me feel like we’d been doing this for years.
“So,” Marc linked our hands together and kissed the top of my head. “How was the rest of your day?”
“Great, actually.” I told him about the group yoga class with four participants I’d had this afternoon, the woman who cried during it, and then thanked me for the release. The idea I’d been turning over in my mind to start a crystal healing class next month since I already had a few inquiries. And he listened the way he always did—without interruptions, asking the right questions at the right moments.
“It sounds like the shop is doing well,” he said. “I’m so proud of you. Your aunt would be, too.”
I drew in a breath and on the exhale said, “Thanks. But it’s not doing as well as it needs to. And I don’t know about her being proud of me.”
“What do you mean?” His hand tightened slightly around mine, but he said nothing else and just waited until I was ready to elaborate.
“I feel guilty,” I admitted. My voice sounded smaller than I’d intended. “Like I’m betraying her. Sales are down, and part of that is my fault. It took me longer to move here than I thought it would. She left me this incredible legacy, and I can’t hold on to it by myself, so it feels like I failed her somehow. And Cheryl has offered to buy into the business so we’d each own half, and I hate that I can’t successfully run this business by myself like my aunt did.” A wry chuckle escaped my mouth. “I know it’s probably not rational.”
“It’s rational,” Marc said. “It’s just not accurate.” He was quiet for a moment longer, likely choosing his words carefully the way he did when something was important to him. “Your aunt brought crystals to a veterinary clinic. She knew I might not believe in what she was offering, but she did it anyway because she wanted good things for me. That was who she was.” His thumb moved across the back of my hand. “A real partner to share the load and the expenses—that’s not a betrayal of her legacy. That’s honoring it. She’d want you to be healthy, happy, and thriving in whatever way that looked like.”
The tears came before I’d decided to let them fall. I shut my eyes and thought about what Marc said. In the stillness, I asked my intuition, the side of me that just knew things, the side I’d stopped fully trusting over the years, the question I needed to. I asked with intention rather than desperation, the way Aunt Jem had taught me.
Inside my mind, I voiced whether she’d want this for me. Whether it was the right path to take to honor her legacy.
