Lahat ng Kabanata ng After Hours Service: Kabanata 31 - Kabanata 40

My phone buzzed against the nightstand at 10:14 a.m., dragging me out of a dream I couldn't quite remember. Something about a dog and a rooftop. I groaned, reaching for it with one hand while the other stayed buried under the pillow. Pickles, who had been sleeping on my feet, protested the movement with a low chirp and relocated to my hip.The Dogfather: I think Rico is dead.I stared at it. Blinked. Pickles shifted on my hip, his weight warm and entirely indifferent to my romantic entanglements.I set the ph

The vineyard unfolded at the end of a private road—rows of grapevines in parallel lines, their leaves catching the last gold of the day. A stone building sat on a hillside, smaller than the main tasting room below, with a terrace that jutted out over the slope. Candles glowed on a table set for two."You know," I said as we stepped out of the SUV, "if you keep taking me to private locations, people might think you're planning to murder me."Antonio held the gate open. "I was shot. You removed the bullet without anesthesia while calling me 'brave boy' and making jokes about my pain tolerance." He paused. "Which of us is actually more concerning?""I'm a medical professional.""You're a veterinarian.""I have steady hands.""You have terrifying hands. You held a scalpel to my shoulder and told me to stop whining.""You were whining.""I was bleeding.""Same thing, different salary bracket." I threw his words back at him, and he laughe

Walter Cronkite sat on my exam table with the glassy indifference of a reptile who had made a terrible life choice and felt no particular urgency about it. The bearded dragon's throat pulsed, his tiny prehistoric eyes tracking my penlight with the faint interest of someone watching a moderately entertaining television program through a window. His X-ray glowed on the lightbox behind me, a tiny Lego brick sitting in his digestive tract like a geometric monument to poor judgment."Can you explain how this happened?" I asked Walter Cronkite directly, shining the penlight into his left eye. He blinked, slow and reptilian, offering nothing.His owner, a fourteen-year-old kid named Trevor with the slouching posture of someone who had been lectured at length already tonight, shifted his weight from one sneaker to the other. "I don't know. He just — I left some stuff on my desk, and—""And Walter Cronkite decided to sample the inventory." I turned back to the X-ray. The Lego was small enough

After dinner, Antonio found a speaker and connected his phone to it. Music filled the house. It was something old and Italian, with a guitar line that wound through the room like smoke. He offered his hand.I kicked off my sneakers. He pulled off his boots. We danced in the living room, barefoot on the hardwood floor, the lake visible through the windows, the last light of the day turning the water copper.He was a graceful dancer. He was deliberate, leading with his shoulders, his hand on the small of my back, his steps measured and slightly off-beat. I followed because the alternative was stepping on his feet, and because his hand on my back made me want to stay exactly where I was."Why did you start the clinic?" he asked as he spun me in time to the music."Because I couldn't work anywhere else," I told him, my cheek near his shoulder. "I applied to three corporate practices. They all wanted production quotas. They demanded their vets push unnecessary procedures, sell prescription

The GPS announced I had arrived at my destination, and I sat in my parked car for a full thirty seconds, staring at the iron gates and the stone house beyond them. Not a restaurant. Not a hotel rooftop with linen tablecloths and a sommelier. A house. Antonio's house. Unlike the day I came to check Rico's paw, we would be entirely alone tonight.The gates opened on their own, and I pulled my secondhand Civic up a gravel drive that curved between trimmed hedges. The house was old stone, sprawling, the kind of place that probably had a name etched above the door in Italian. But the lights glowing from the ground-floor windows were warm and yellow, and when I stepped out of the car, I could smell something that made my stomach clench with immediate, Pavlovian hunger.Garlic. Butter. Something herbal and rich, drifting from an open window.I'd dressed for an extravagant evening. Fitted black shirt, dark jeans, the one pair of boots I owned that didn't have animal sedative splashed across t