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she had her practice and a full schedule of patients to see this coming week, and for now that would have to be enough. One foot in front of the other. Just keep moving. There was little else she could do except pray that someday the ache would ease enough that she’d be able to breathe again.
    As she pulled the cookie sheet out of the oven, she heard the low bark of a big dog at her back door. Her mind flashed immediately to her canine buddy and she found a smile pulling at the corners of her mouth at the thought that he’d come to see her again.
    Laying the cookie sheet on the stove, she pulled off her oven mitt and hurried to the sliding door to look out. Sure enough, he was sitting in the rain, looking up at her with a hopefulness she could practically feel through the glass. Poor guy. He was soaking wet.
    She hesitated to let him in—surely he belonged to someone in the neighborhood. But why would anyone who loved him let him out to roam in weather like this? He shouldn’t be off a leash at all, especially not looking like a monster-sized wolf.
    “Hold on, boy,” she called through the door, then ran back to her laundry room, where she kept a stack of old towels. Grabbing two fraying bath towels, she laid one on the carpet, then opened the door just enough to let the massive animal in, braced for the invariable dash and shake.
    To her surprise, he didn’t bound inside, nor did he shake at all. Instead, he walked forward calmly onto the towel, and stopped, watching her expectantly.
    “You’re amazing.” She closed the door behind him, then opened the second towel and rubbed him down. “Someone’s trained you well.”
    The dog looked up, meeting her gaze with a look in his eyes that she could swear was amusement. “You’re way too smart for your own good, aren’t you, boy?” She knelt in front of him, rubbing down his head and neck, watching the pleasure fill those beautiful eyes. Oddly, he didn’t even try to lick her face, which most dogs did given the opportunity. “You’re quite the gentleman.” She dried his legs and his belly, then finished with a quick rub of his tail.
    “There you go. I’m afraid I don’t have any dog food, but I have leftovers from dinner. How about chicken and green beans? That shouldn’t be too terrible for you. I’ve also got cookies. Do you have a sweet tooth, boy?”
    To her surprise, he shook his head . . . or appeared to. She laughed. “You’re really something.”
    She pulled a wide, shallow plastic food storage container out of the cupboard, then cut up the leftover chicken and green beans and heated them in the microwave just enough to take off the chill. After pouring the mixture into the plastic container, she set it on the floor in the corner.
    The big animal looked up at her with an unmistakable gleam of thanks in his eyes, then turned to the food and wolfed it down while she filled another container with water.
    She picked up the cake recipe she’d thought to make tonight, but no longer felt driven to continue her baking and set it down again. The animal’s presence had calmed her, pulling her back from that edge of desperation that always drove her to bake.
    Maybe, instead, she’d try to get some work done. While the dog ate, Natalie grabbed her laptop off the counter and settled on the floral-patterned sofa in her small family room. As she pulled up the file of the first patient she saw on Friday, and the results of the vision tests she’d run on the girl, the tension began to ease out of her shoulders. For the first time all day, she felt like she could breathe freely again. This was what she’d been born to do. It was no wonder, considering she had two younger brothers whose lives had been handicapped by their eyes’ inability to function optimally, if at all. Her youngest brother, Xavier, had been born blind, but it was James, only two years her junior, who’d actually had the hardest time thanks to a pair of undiagnosed vision problems that