I bent and ruffled Frankie’s ears the way he liked, right at the base where the fur was softest.
He blinked up at me with those cloudy, patient eyes and gave one lazy thump of his tail.
I stepped out onto the porch and pulled the door shut behind me.
He blinked up at me.
***
Yesterday, I had to run another errand while Kenny was at work.
I called Mrs. Alvarez’s teenage daughter, Isabella, and asked her to babysit for a while.
As I left the house, the kids safely under Isabella’s care, I glanced through the window one last time at Frankie dozing in his bed, not knowing that by the time I turned my key in the lock again, my whole world would already be tilting sideways.
I glanced through the window one last time.
***
The second I stepped through the front door that afternoon, something felt off.
The house was too quiet in the wrong way.
Then I saw her.
Diane sat at my kitchen table, her hands folded around one of my good mugs, a suitcase parked neatly by the stairs.
Jillian and Laurence were coloring on the rug beside her, their heads bent over their pages.
The babysitter was nowhere to be seen.
Then I saw her.
“Where’s Isabella?” I asked without a greeting.
“Andrea, honey, you’re home,” Diane said, all sugar. “Oh, I sent her home. I used the emergency key. Thought I’d surprise everyone and stay a few days. You don’t mind, do you?”
I made my mouth smile. I don’t know how.
“Mommy, look, I made a rainbow horse,” Jillian said, holding up her page.
“Where’s Isabella?”
“It’s beautiful, baby,” I told her, and my eyes were already sweeping the room.
Something was bothering me.
Frankie didn’t come out to greet me. He wasn’t sitting beside the children like he always did, and his bed was empty.
No click of nails on the tile. No slow, arthritic shuffle toward the door where he always waited for me. Sixteen years, and he’d never missed a homecoming.
“Frankie?” I called. “Buddy?”
Nothing.
Something was bothering me.
I walked through the living room, the hallway, and the laundry nook where my childhood pet sometimes napped when the sun hit just right. I checked behind the couch and in our bedrooms.
The back sliding door was cracked open. The gate at the far end of the yard stood wide open, swinging a little in the breeze.
My hands grew cold. I searched the yard. Nothing.
I walked back to the kitchen slowly, fighting the urge to scream.
The back sliding door was cracked open.
“Diane. Where is Frankie?”
My MIL stirred her coffee, calm as ever.
“Oh. He was underfoot while I was carrying my bag in. Whining and following me around. You know how dogs get at his age. So I put him outside the gate.”
Something flickered across her face, quick as a blink.
At his age.
The way she said it, careful and rehearsed, as if it were a line she’d been holding in her mouth all afternoon.
“You know how dogs get at his age.”
My knees actually softened under me. I caught myself on the counter.
“He’s 16, Diane. My dog can barely hear. He doesn’t go outside without someone being there with him.”
“Well, he did today.”
“Why did you have to let him loose?” I challenged.
“Mommy?” Laurence looked up, his crayon frozen. “Is Frankie lost?”
“No, baby,” I said, forcing my voice to stay calm for him. “Mommy’s gonna find him. Color with your sister.”
“Well, he did today.”
I turned back to Diane, and something inside me that had been polite for six years finally snapped clean in half.
