PART 2
I got out of bed very slowly.
I walked down the hallway the way I always do. One hand on the wall. Counting steps. Eleven to the kitchen doorway.
The perfume was so strong now I could almost taste it.
“I know you’re there,” I said.
Silence.
Then a quick breath. A chair scraping. Someone trying not to move.
“I can’t see you,” I said calmly. “But I can hear you breathing. And I can smell your perfume. You’ve been wearing it in my house for three months.”
A woman’s voice. Young. Shaking.
“Barrett said you’d never know.”
“Barrett said a lot of things.”
“He said you can’t see anything. That you’d never notice. He said I could stay here while he figured out what to do with you.”
What to do with me.
“How long have you been coming here?”
“Since August,” she whispered. “Sometimes I sit right there on the couch while you’re in the room. He thought it was funny. The dog was the only one who knew.”
Duke. Growling at the couch. At the kitchen. At the hallway.
Trying to tell me.
“What’s your name?”
“Liv.”
“Liv,” I said, “I’m going to call the police now. You can stay or you can leave. But you’re not coming back.”
I said “Call 911” to my phone.
Liv ran. The front door slammed.
Two officers came. Then my sister. I told them everything.
Barrett came home at lunch and found my sister and a police officer in his kitchen.
He tried to laugh it off. “She’s confused. She imagines things. It’s the blindness.”
The officer had already talked to Liv. She’d been stopped two blocks away and told him everything.
Barrett had been planning to leave me. But first, he wanted to move me into an assisted living facility and take control of our house and my disability pension. He’d already called two facilities asking about “cognitively impaired blind adults.”
I’m not cognitively impaired. I teach braille to eighty students a year.
Duke had been the one thing standing in his way. Duke went everywhere with me. Duke growled at Liv. As long as Duke was there, I wasn’t alone.
So he sold him for three hundred dollars.
I filed for divorce the following week. My lawyer found that Barrett had been moving money from our joint account into an account Liv had opened. He was ordered to pay it back. He moved out with two suitcases.
The guide dog school found Duke in five days. His microchip was scanned at a vet’s office in a town forty miles away. The family who bought him had no idea he was a guide dog. When they found out, they drove him back to me themselves.
I was standing on my front porch when their car pulled up.
I heard the door open.
Then paws on the concrete. Running.
Duke hit my legs so hard I almost fell over. His whole body was wagging. He whined and pressed his nose into my hand, over and over.
I sat down right there on the porch and cried into his fur.
He never leaves my side now. Not even for a second.
Sometimes, at night, he still lifts his head and sniffs the air toward the kitchen.
Just to check.
THE END.