Page 51 of Rescued By the Dog Trainer
Nadia comes around the corner with Zip on a slack lead. She has an apple in one hand and her pocketknife in the other.
"Morning."
"Morning."
Zip goes to the trough. Nadia cuts a wedge off the apple and eats it off the blade. She keeps her eyes on her dog.
"You flew critical care out of Bagram five years back." Nadia cuts another wedge off the apple. "October."
My hands stay on the hose. The water runs into the trough.
"Jason took shrapnel outside Kandahar that same month." She keeps her eyes on Zip. "Woke up at Landstuhl with his femoral artery put back together."
Water climbs the galvanized steel. Zip drinks, her collar tags clinking against the rim.
"So?"
"You don't need a security clearance to line up two dates on a calendar." Nadia folds the knife against her thigh and slides it into her pocket.
"Coincidence." I turn the spigot off, and the rushing water cuts out until the yard goes quiet. "There were dozens of flight crews running criticals out of Bagram that month."
"Come on." Nadia bumps her shoulder lightly against mine, a grin tugging at her mouth. "The whole bunkhouse has eyes. You two aren't exactly keeping it a secret. He watches the road every time you drive down that mountain like a man waiting on his whole world to come back up the hill. And nobody thinks you've been spending your evenings in the tack room just to share the woodstove."
"We talk about training."
"Right. Training." Her teasing softens into genuine warmth, her voice dropping into quiet sisterly territory. "Just think about it for five seconds. How incredible would it be if it were true? You kept him breathing across an ocean, and five years later you end up here? Fate handed two tired soldiers a second chance."
A tightness catches in my chest and steals my breath.
"He's a good man." She gathers Zip's lead and turns toward the paddock path. "Whatever history you're carrying... don't make him pull it out of you. He'll never ask, but he deserves to know who held him together."
She walks toward the gate. The trough is full, water sheeting over the lip onto the stones.
She figured out in thirty seconds what I've spent days trying to hide. And if Nadia can connect those dates, how long before Jason does?
Juno waits at the corner of the barn where I left her on a sit. I go to her.
Drills run until noon. Sarah works Tank on brace transitions along the rail, testing her stride. Brody drills Babe on alert cues, rewarding the retriever with a quiet scratch behind the ears when she breaks his freeze. Griff and Chief sit out on the porch, Chief resting his bandaged shoulder against Griff's knee.
I keep Juno on the far side of the paddock from Nadia and tell myself it's about the dogs.
After lunch, Jason takes me to the east fence.
New wire to string across the posts he set, tight before the next snow. I hold the wire while he drives staples into the fresh pine. He works with the hammer close to his body. Two hits per staple. Never three.
"Cole Blake called me yesterday while you were down in the valley." His face stays on the post. "He's the ER doc down at the clinic in Angel's Peak."
"The medical clinic?" The wire cuts a line across my glove.
"Tess Carrington runs the place. She's a trauma surgeon out of Denver." A staple goes in. Two hits. "Their senior trauma nurse retires in April, and Cole's holding the posting till May."
The sixty-day program ends the last week of April. May first means a posting five miles down the mountain the day after graduation. The wire strains against my grip, cutting into the leather of my glove.
I drove up here with an unopened envelope in my dash because I couldn't stomach reading that my career was over, and he's laying out a clinic schedule like my future is already decided.
"They want to meet you. Tomorrow, if you'll go." He sets the next staple and doesn't hit it. "Small trauma bay. Decent equipment. Nobody makes you fly."
Ground trauma. No flight deck, no engine roar shaking the deck plates under my boots. Just medicine with my feet on the floor.
