Page 67 of The Quiet Tenant

At dinner, you hear a sound. He notices it first. He is a man attuned to his surroundings, eyes and ears everywhere, always. You catch up, then Cecilia. The three of you sit with your heads cocked toward the back door, brows furrowed. A scraping, something—someone—whining.

Cecilia points in the direction of the sound. “It’s coming from outside.”

“Must be a critter,” he says.

She shakes her head and gets up. With two fingers, she draws a shade back.

“Cecilia, don’t—”

Before he can tell her to sit back down, she’s at the door, twisting the knob open. For a brief moment, it’s you and him and the open door, cold wind swirling between your bodies. He shoots you a look.Give me a break,you want to tell him.Do you really think I’m going to run? Here? Now? I can still feel the scar tissue, tender and thick at the back of my head. I can still feel what you did to me the last time.

Cecilia returns. You swallow a gasp. Her shirt—it’s bleeding red. She holds her arms out in front of her. Against her chest is a quivering black mass.

Her father recoils. “Cecilia, what the f—” Here, he remembers he’s not a man who swears, at least not in front of people who are not you, and certainly not in front of his child. “What are you doing?”

She crouches and delicately places the ball of black fur on the kitchen floor. It’s a dog. A wounded dog with a large, open gash on its left leg, blood gushing onto the tile.

Your face heats up. You lose feeling in your fingers. You used to love dogs. You had one, growing up—a Newfie-and-Bernese-mountain-dog mix. Absolutely enormous. All love, all slobber, all the time.

This dog is small. If it could stand, you figure it would be about a foot tall. You make out pointy ears, a long snout. A little terrier, panting, big brown eyes bouncing frantically from one end of the kitchen to the other.

“Cecilia, the door.”

He rushes to close it. His first order of business, always—shielding you from the world. Then he kneels next to his daughter, leans over the dog.

His kid looks up at him. The gaze of a little child, round eyes and a boundless faith in her father’s ability to make everything better.

“We have to help her,” she says.

You get up, too, walk to the other side of the kitchen table. He raises an eyebrow at you, likeThat’s enough—you can stop now.

You cross your arms over your chest. Cecilia insists. “We have to help her. Maybe she got hit by a car. Someone must have left her on the side of the highway.” A jolt of electricity in your brain.The highway? Cecilia’s voice quavers. “Come on. She must have walked miles to get here. We have to do something.”

Miles.How many? Five? Ten? Thirteen? Is it a walkable distance? Is it runnable?

To your right, a father sighs, pinches his temples between his thumb and middle finger. “I’m not sure there’s anything we can do.”

She shakes her head. “We can help her. Take her to a vet. She doesn’t have a collar.” The tremble in her voice again: “No one wants her. We can’t leave her like this.”

He rubs his hand over his face. The dog is still oozing blood. Some of it gets on the soles of his boots. He’ll scrub them later. He must be good at it, getting that stuff off his clothes, off his skin, off every particle of him. He has to be.

“Cecilia.”

He looks down at the dog. That’s how they get started, you remember. People like him. You heard it on TV as a kid, in podcasts as an adult. It begins when they’re children, sometimes teens. Somewhere around his daughter’s age, between childhood and adulthood. A child traps butterflies in an airless box. Family pets go missing. Squirrels turn up dead at the bottom of a tree. That’s how they practice. How they test the waters, toe the darkness below.

“It’s too late,” he tells her.

She says it’s not, it’s not too late, look, the dog’s still breathing. But he doesn’t listen. He gets up, brings a hand to his waistband. You hadn’t noticed it there—the gun in its holster. He doesn’t usually carry it around the house. It must be a new precaution, one he decided on after your close call in the living room.

Cecilia looks up. “What are you doing?”

The same question is lodged in your throat. He can’t possibly be considering it. In front of you, he’d do it. But in front of his kid?

He wraps his fingers around the gun. Every muscle in your body tenses. “Sometimes it’s the humane thing to do,” he says. “The dog’s suffering. There’s no way it can be helped.”

She puts her hands on the animal. With her bare palms, she applies pressure to the wound. So much blood—on her hands, underneath her fingers, up to her elbows. “She’s still breathing,” she says, and the dog’s rib cage expands as if to confirm. “Please, Dad. Please.”

A tear rolls down her cheek. She wipes it immediately. Blood at the corner of her eye, blood on her chin.

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