Page 12 of Patch

The empty space in the rack stared back. One vial missing. Used. Drawn. Injected into a man who’d been shot on a county road and brought to a vet clinic because hospitals meant police.

My initials would be on the log sheet. Right next to the discrepancy. Right next to the missing vial.

I closed the drawer. Locked it.

I could have falsified the log. Written in a different number. Said we’d used it on the spay Friday morning. The spay had taken longer than it should have. Gerry wouldn’t question it. Tessa wouldn’t know the difference.

I didn’t do it.

The lie sat in my throat and I swallowed it back down. Falsifying a controlled substance log was its own separate felony. Worse than the discrepancy. Worse than practicing without a license. That lie turns a mistake into a pattern, and patterns are what licensing boards look for.

I left the number as it was. Six vials. One missing. My initials. The truth, or enough of it.

Stitch’s claws clicked on the tile. Three-legged hobble. Slow. Unhurried. He came around the corner of the supply cabinet and stopped, one ear forward, looking at me like I’d interrupted something important.

“You’re not supposed to be in here,” I said.

He didn’t care. He never cared. He hopped onto the procedure table, cleared now, disinfected, the stainless steel gleaming under the fluorescents, and settled into a loaf position directly where Freak’s head had been. His orange fur caught the light. His one good ear twitched.

I let him stay.

The room was empty. Patch and Brazil had loaded Freak into a different truck. Not the blood-soaked one, a clean one that had pulled up while I was washing my gloves. They’d moved him carefully. The drain had held. His color was better. Patch had dipped his chin, and they were gone.

The door had closed behind them. The headlights had swept across the lot and vanished. The clinic had gone quiet in a way that felt permanent.

The fear arrived in layers.

First layer: the missing vial. Log discrepancy. The state board did random audits. Sometimes announced, sometimes not. Sometimes they called. Sometimes they showed up. The clinic had been clean for six years. One discrepancy was all it took.

Second layer: practicing medicine without a license. Human medicine. On a gunshot wound. With veterinary instruments. With drugs labeled for animal use only. The penalty started at a reprimand on my record and went from there. Probation. Suspension. Revocation, if they decided I’d meant it. And sitting underneath all of that like a floor that might not hold, the part the board had no say in at all, because practicing human medicine without a license isn’t a licensing matter. It’s a criminal one. Possibly criminal charges. Possibly jail. Definitely the end of my credential, my career I’d trained years for.

Third layer: my grandmother. Thirty-two hundred a month. The memory care facility didn’t take I’m sorry as payment. They took checks. Checks required income. Income required a license. No license meant no income meant no checks meant my grandmother sitting in a state facility somewhere with people who didn’t know her name.

Fourth layer: I couldn’t tell anyone. Not Tessa. Not Gerry. Not the police. Not the state board. The story had no safe version. Every telling made it worse. I had cut into a man last night with scissors meant for dogs and I had saved his life and I could never say it out loud.

The paper in my pocket was warm from my body. Patch’s handwriting. His number. I’d put it in my phone.

I had not called it. I had checked four separate times that it was still there, which is a different thing, and I knew it was a different thing while I was doing it.

I hadn’t looked at it again. The digits were already in my head, filed alongside the pulse counts and the respiration rates and the fact that his hands had locked on the retractor and he’d stepped back against the wall without a word.

I was complicit by choice. I had opened the door. I had reached for the crash cart. I had drawn the drugs without being asked. I had known exactly what I was risking and I had done it anyway because the man in the truck was bleeding and I had the hands to stop it.

That didn’t make the fear smaller. It made it heavier.

I finished the floors. Emptied the mop bucket. Wiped down the counters. The room looked clean. Nobody would know. The blood was gone. The instruments were sterilized. The only evidence was in the logbook and in the missing vial and in the memory of a drain running clear onto stainless steel.

I locked the back door. Set the alarm. Walked to my car through gravel still wet from the rain.

My headlights cut two white bars across the county road. No other cars. Just me and the empty asphalt and the clinic receding in the rearview mirror, its windows dark, its lot empty.

I drove home on autopilot. Hands on the wheel. Eyes on the road. The paper in my pocket. The numbers in my head. The fear sitting in my chest like something I’d swallowed.

My apartment was dark. I didn’t turn on the lights. I kicked off my shoes by the door. I’d changed at the clinic before I left, the way I changed every night, because you didn’t carry a building home on your clothes. The bloody set went into a bag, and the bag was still in the trunk. I hadn’t decided yet whether I was washing them or burning them. I didn’t wash my face. Didn’t brush my teeth. I lay down on top of the covers and stared at the ceiling.

Grandmother: thirty-two hundred a month. Without the credential, I’d be making fifteen an hour as a kennel tech. Maybe less. Fifteen an hour was twenty-four hundred a month before taxes. After taxes: eighteen hundred. The gap was fourteen hundred dollars. Fourteen hundred dollars a month that my grandmother’s memory care facility expected to see in an envelope with my signature on it.

I had maybe three months of savings. Tops. If I was careful. If nothing broke. If the car held together. If the clinic didn’t fire me the day the state board showed up.