Page 94 of The Boyfriend Algorithm

After approximately four minutes, the dog sniffed my hand.

After six minutes, she licked my fingers.

After eight minutes, she was in my lap.

I carried her inside.

This is where the intentions start to diverge from the outcomes.

The dog—I haven’t named her yet, because naming feels like Ruby’s right, the way Ruby named me—needs three things: food, water, and warmth. I can provide all of these.

Food: I don’t have dog food. I do have the dog biscuits I make for bakery customers. I break four into small pieces and set them on a plate on the floor. She eats them in under a minute and looks at me for more. I give her four more.

Water: I fill a mixing bowl and set it next to the food. She drinks for a long time. The sound of her drinking fills the bakery kitchen, and it’s a good sound—an alive sound.

Warmth: I sit on the kitchen floor and she curls into my lap and I hold her the way I hold Ruby when she falls asleep against me—carefully, completely, with no intention of moving.

She falls asleep in eleven minutes. Her breathing evens out. Her shaking stops. Her body relaxes against mine, warm and small and trusting in a way that feels enormous.

I sit on the bakery floor at 2:30 a.m. with a stray dog in my lap and I understand, for the first time, why Ruby took me in. Because when something lost shows up at your door, you don’t calculate the risk. You don’t run the scenarios. You just open the door wider and figure the rest out later.

This is where I should have stopped. Fed the dog, kept her warm, and waited for Ruby to wake up so we could make a decision together.

I did not stop.

Because the dog needed a bath. This was objectively true—she was muddy and her fur was matted and she smelled like the alley and Ruby’s bakery cannot smell like the alley.

So I bathed her in the kitchen sink. This went poorly.

The dog did not want a bath. She communicated this by thrashing, splashing water across the entire kitchen, and at one point launching herself off my chest and running three laps around the prep table before I caught her behind the flour rack. The flour rack did not survive this encounter. Nor did two bags of all-purpose flour, which exploded on impact and covered approximately sixty percent of the kitchen floor.

The dog, now wet and covered in flour, looked like a small ghost.

I cleaned the floor. I re-bathed the dog. The second bath went marginally better, in that she only splashed water across forty percent of the kitchen instead of a hundred. I dried her with clean bakery towels—three of them—and she emerged looking significantly better, if slightly damp and deeply offended.

I assessed the situation. The bakery kitchen was wet. The flour was gone. The towels were ruined. The dog was clean but looking at me with an expression I recognized from Ruby—the one that says I’m not angry, I’m just processing how you managed to make this worse.

I decided to take her upstairs.

This was my second mistake.

The apartment is Ruby’s space. It contains Ruby’s things. Ruby’s couch, Ruby’s books, Ruby’s carefully organized life that I spent weeks optimizing into a functional system.

The dog had different ideas about the system.

In the twenty minutes between entering the apartment and the point at which I lost control of the situation, the dog accomplished the following:

She pulled three books off the shelf and chewed the corner of one. She climbed onto the couch and dug at the cushions until the throw blanket—the one I fold into a perfect rectangle every morning—was a crumpled ball on the floor. She found Ruby’s shoes by the door and carried one into the kitchen and deposited it in the water bowl I had set out. She peed on the rug by the bathroom door. She discovered the trash can, knocked it over, and distributed its contents across the living room floor.

Then she found Ruby’s bra hanging from the bathroom doorknob—I don’t know why it was there, Ruby’s organizational habits in the bathroom remain inconsistent—and carried it to the couch and curled up on top of it like a nest and fell asleep.

I stood in the middle of the apartment and surveyed the damage.

The books were scattered. The couch was dismantled. A shoe was floating in a water bowl. There was pee on the rug and trash on the floor. The apartment looked like it had been burglarized.

I had approximately two hours before Ruby’s alarm went off.

I began cleaning.