Page 15 of Patch

“Anyway, Gerry said the alarm company needed one, which, why would they need the storage room? That’s where we keep paper towels.”

She finally looked at me. Waiting for an answer I didn’t have.

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Right? It’s weird. Also, the backroom door was unlocked yesterday morning. I went in to get the paper towels and the door was just. Open. Not like, unlocked. Open. As in someone forgot to close it. And Gerry wasn’t here yet, and you hadn’t come in, and I was like, hello, ghost burglar, but nothing was missing, so.” She shrugged. “Probably nothing. Gerry’s been spacey since his sister started visiting. Man cannot keep track of his own feet lately.”

She went back to the paper. The conversation moved on. Tessa’s conversations always moved on. She lived in real time, narrating her own life as it happened, dropping observations like breadcrumbs and never doubling back to see if anyone had picked them up.

I filed it away. The recut key. The unlocked door. Gerry’s explanation about the alarm company. Small things. Nothing concrete. Enough to make the hollow feeling behind my sternum widen by another inch.

Gerry left at four-thirty. Same as every day.

Tessa clocked out at six. Scrubs swapped for jeans and a sweatshirt. Her nails caught the light one last time before she shoved her hands in her pockets.

“Don’t stay too late,” she said. Gerry’s line. Delivered with a grin that said she knew it was his line and she was stealing it anyway. “It’s Saturday. Nobody’s coming in with anything that can’t wait till morning.”

“I won’t,” I said.

The door closed. The bell chimed. The clinic settled into its evening quiet.

I did the closing routine. Mop bucket. Supply count. The autoclave cycle finished with its usual sigh. I wiped down the counters. Checked the fridge temperatures. Made sure the controlled cabinet was locked. The binder sat on the shelf. I didn’t open the log. I didn’t have to. The numbers were in my head. Seven yesterday. Six today. My initials. The gap.

I was halfway to the back door when I saw the card.

Slipped under the front door. White. Professional. The state seal in the corner. I hadn’t noticed it when I’d locked up. It must have come after Tessa left. After the door was locked. Someone had pushed it through the gap between the door and the threshold, and it had lain there on the tile, face-up, waiting.

I picked it up. Dana Whitlock. Investigator. State Veterinary Licensing Board. A phone number. An email. Below that, typed in a font so small I had to hold the card at arm’s length to read it:

Re: Controlled Substance Discrepancy. Clinic Audit Pending. Please call within two weeks to schedule. Failure to respond may result in automatic license suspension pending investigation.

The card was cold between my fingers. The paper was thick. Quality stock. The kind governments used when they wanted you to know they were serious.

I read it three times. The date at the bottom was yesterday’s. She’d typed it before she’d slipped it under the door. Before Freak had been shot. Before the drugs had been drawn. Before any of it. A discrepancy had been flagged already. The audit was coming. The two-week window was a courtesy, not a reprieve.

I turned the card over. Blank on the back. Nothing else. Just Dana Whitlock’s name and title and the sentence that would end my career in fourteen days or less.

I sat down on the stool behind the front desk. The card in my hand. The binder on the shelf. Stitch on the procedure table in the back, probably asleep, probably dreaming of whatever three-legged cats dream about.

The realization arrived in stages, like the fear had, but colder. Cleaner. Without the shake.

I couldn’t lie. The log was there. My initials were there. The numbers didn’t match. Dana Whitlock would count the vials and compare them to the log and the discrepancy would be exactly what it was: one vial missing, documented in my handwriting, on a night when no procedures had been scheduled and no animals had been treated. Sure, Gerry signed off on it sometimes, but for the most part, it was my job. And I’d be held accountable.

I couldn’t run. My grandmother was at Maple Grove. Thirty-two hundred a month. My credential was on the wall behind the front desk. Two years of school and a national exam, and six years on the floor to earn the right to hang it there. Six years of building a life in a building she spent every working day inside. Running meant leaving her. Leaving the job. Leaving the only thing I’d built that was entirely mine.

I couldn’t be saved. Not by Gerry, who had told Tessa a thing about a key that I was fairly sure wasn’t true. Couldn’t be saved by Tessa, who was nineteen and loud and would panic. Not even by Patch and his club and his number. This wasn’t a problem the club could solve with violence or money. This was paperwork. This was procedure. This was a state investigator with a tablet and a lanyard and the absolute, unassailable authority of being right.

Dana Whitlock was doing her job. Exactly her job. The job the state paid her to do. She would count the vials. She would read the log. She would see the discrepancy. And then she would ask me why, and I would have to answer, and every answer led to the same place: practicing medicine without a license on a controlled substance log that had my handwriting on it.

I put the card in my pocket. Next to Patch’s receipt. Two pieces of paper. Two different kinds of trouble.

I decided to stay silent. Not forever. I wasn’t that naive. The card had a two-week window. In fourteen days, Dana Whitlock would call, or she would show up, or she would file the paperwork that suspended my license pending investigation. The silence would break. The truth would come out. The numbers would speak for themselves.

But for now, silence was the only move I had. The only move that didn’t make everything worse. Telling Gerry would implicate him in something he might not deserve. Telling Tessa would scare her. Telling Patch would pull the club into a problem they couldn’t fix, and Freak was already enough. Nobody in the club had wandered into it. They’d all signed on knowing exactly what the work was, and one of them had a hole in him because of it. Not one of them would have called that unfair.

I would wait. I would work. I would show up tomorrow and the next day and the day after that and I would do the job the way I’d always done it, with steady hands and a clear head.

Stitch hopped off the procedure table and came looking for me. His three-legged gait carried him through the doorway and into reception, where he stopped, one ear forward, looking at me like he’d been expecting me to be somewhere else.