Dr. Sloane Avery spent thirty years being the one who holds everyone together. Now the only one left to hold her is the dog her husband built to outlive them both — and the dog is unimpressed with her coping.She has spent thirty years being the calmest person in every room — the psychologist everyone brings their sorrow to, the wife who quietly kept the life that let her husband shine. Then Marcus died, the house went silent, and Sloane discovered she had no idea how to be the one who needs holding.
Theodora is not fooled.
Sloane’s therapy dog is sixteen years old, dry as a winter morning, and formal to the point of comedy. Marcus engineered her to live as long as they would, and gave her a voice — because he couldn’t bear the thought of Sloane alone in a quiet house with no one to talk back. She has a considered opinion about nearly everything, which she delivers at a volume calibrated for discretion and landing somewhat short of it. She has notes. She always has notes.
When a counseling post arrives from a settlement three light-years away — where humans and an alien people are learning, painfully, to understand one another — Sloane accepts before she’s finished deciding to. It isn’t running away, she tells herself. It’s choosing forward.
“It would be a change of scenery.”
“It would be approximately three light-years.”
“That’s what I said.”
Waiting aboard the ship is a stubbornly warm family of strangers — and a quiet mystery that leads Sloane to the husband she thought she knew completely, and the man she never quite met. Somewhere out in the dark between worlds, she begins to learn what thirty years of counseling others never required of her: that being known and being kept are not the same — and that it is never too late to be the one who gets looked after.
She’ll resist, of course. Theodora has a plan.
