I should have listened to my instincts when I saw him sitting on the bench and thought, that motherfucker has my dog. Instead, I checked my anger. Learning to calibrate my reaction to the circumstances was a journey I was on. My online therapist always told me to consider the feelings of others. Actually, she phrased it as a question: “How do you think the other person might be feeling?” She phrased everything as a question, though she seemed to already have all the answers. She would sit there on Zoom, waiting for me to figure it out, whisking her matcha with a little broom.

I figured this man probably felt like he was just sitting on a bench with his dog, and I should give him the benefit of the doubt. The dog might not even have been mine.

As I walked up, Butter rose on her rickety haunches and craned her nose. That was her nose, with the one pinkish patch, like a pencil eraser implanted in her schnoz.

“You have my dog!” I said.

The man turned to me, startled. He had wide, expressive eyes and a bald spot just beginning to be visible from straight on. “This is my dog. Everest,” he said.

I fell to my knees on the sidewalk, scrunching Butter around the ears and smushing my face into her neck. I couldn’t believe it. A year later, here she was. My mutt. Her same smell was there, meaty and warm and mouthy, but with something unfamiliar on top, embedded in her fur. The smell of another home, or another person. “Butter. I’ve missed you so much.” She sent a searching tongue across my ear. My heart thrilled. And, in my four decades on this Earth, I had seldom been thrilled.

“Butter? I’m sorry, but this is Everest,” he said again. “Everest.” As if that proved it. At the word, Butter turned from me and stared up at the man.

The betrayal. I scratched at the base of her tail, her favorite spot, encouraging her head back toward me with my arm. “Butter, don’t you remember Mommy?”

“Everest doesn’t—”

“Her name is Butter!” I controlled my voice. This man was probably feeling taken aback right now. “She ran away a year ago. But I had her for a year before that.”

“A year ago?” The man pouted in thought. He was wearing a fuzzy cardigan that looked a month or two too warm for October in Austin. His face enraged me. “That’s right around the time I got Everest,” he said. “My neighbor said she just showed up on the porch one night.”

“And you didn’t call the number on the tag?”

“There was no tag. That’s what my neighbor said.”

“She always wore a tag.” It didn’t matter. Maybe I would never learn the trajectory of Butter’s misadventures on the lam. A woman is entitled to a few secrets. The important thing was, she was here now. “She found me anyway. It was meant to be.”

“Do you believe in fate?”

I looked up, still crouching on the sidewalk, and the man was gazing at me with a bright half-smile. “No,” I said. “But I believe that dogs know things we don’t.” I stood. “How are we going to do this? Should I come over to your house to collect Butter’s things?”

He blinked and tightened his hand on the leash. “What do you mean?”

“This is my dog.” I thought I had made that apparent. “I’ll need to take her home.”

“But Everest is my dog. I’ve had her for a year.”

“I had her for a year! I can show you the paperwork from the shelter! Look.” I dug my phone from my purse. The keys and pens and pepper spray rattled against my shaking hand. I’d archived all the photos of Butter, a mandate from my therapist, but I pulled one up and showed the guy. There was Butter, her overlarge body balanced dangerously along the top of the couch, her face placid, one lip stuck on her gums.

The man looked at the photo, and I expected him to bluster or argue, but he sounded delighted. “What do you know! There’s my Everest. I’m David.” He stuck out a hand.

I didn’t want to take it, but I did. “Susan.”

“How about we let Everest decide?”

“Butter. What exactly do you have in mind?”

We were a block away from a park, so we headed there. Walking with my dog with a stranger holding the leash compounded my anxiety. Butter’s gait was as asymmetrical as I remembered, but with David at the leash, she moved in an orderly line, not darting aside to wheeze at litter or squirrels the way she used to.

At the park, I flinched when David unhooked the leash. “Don’t let her off,” I said. “That’s how she ran away in the first place.” It had happened in a wink. One moment she was chasing her threadbare ball across the grass, the next, she was gone.

“She always stays in my sight,” he said, maddeningly calm. “Come.” He motioned to me, and I followed as we backed up, twenty feet away from Butter, who watched with mild interest. David looked between me, himself, and the dog, making some sort of complicated figure off his forehead like he was splicing the angle with his hands. He gestured me a few degrees to the left, a few more, then seemed satisfied. “All right.” He nodded. “Call her.”

“Butter!” I cried, as David yelled “Everest!” Other people in the park stopped their walks and basketball games to watch, but I called louder. I didn’t care. Butter was rascally and distractable, but all the times I had taken her out when she woke me in the middle of the night, or wiped her slobber from my hair, or stayed on the floor till my legs were numb because she had decided to fall asleep across my lap, those had to count for something. She had to know her mama.

I clapped my hands. David kept smacking his leg. Butter was enjoying this, us both performing like monkeys for her amusement. She settled down onto the grass to watch the show.

“No, Butter,” I shouted. “Come here! Stand up!”

She cocked her head at me, one lip swinging loose. She rose to her feet. Even at a distance, I could see her deep concentration as she sorted through her mental stores. She listed in my direction.

“Everest!” David cried.

“Butter!”

Butter loped toward us, meandering, savoring the attention with the eyes of the park on her. She was coming in my direction, closer, closer—

Then she redirected, walked up to David, and nuzzled him right in his dumb knee.

It shouldn’t have come as a surprise that Butter would go for the man. From the start, she was a little slutty, walking up to men on the street to lick their hands, tackling male dogs at the park so she could sniff their balls. It was a disappointment, since I’d gotten a female dog specifically to be my gal pal, my Golden Girls cheesecake-on-the-couch buddy to help me welcome the dawn of middle age. On the heels of a breakup, I had wanted to scour all testosterone from my life. Butter could never meet me where I was at. But I loved her not a bit less.

I told myself that Butter only liked David because he was her more recent owner. The person who’d dispensed her food for the past year. I hated the shared custody arrangement David proposed as a compromise: three days at my house, three days at his. It grated on me that after finally getting my dog back, I could only see her half the time, and that David was part of the deal. A cumbersome appendage that should never have been there—a phantom limb in reverse. David had upped the amount of human interaction in my life, something I’d found many ways to minimize. I worked from home editing textbooks. I ordered my groceries online and picked them up without leaving my car. I liked sunrise hikes and long walks on the beach. I just liked them alone.

I’m not sure whether David annoyed me so much because he was an obstacle in the way of my dog, or whether I disliked sharing my dog with him because he annoyed me. Little things about him rubbed me the wrong way. The turtlenecks that rose almost to his earlobes, making it look like he was being born from his shirt. The stuffed crust pizzas he was always eating—he said he worked in HR for a national chain that made them, and when I arrived to get Butter, she was often chowing down on a crust with a rubbery log of cheese protruding from the center. I just wanted to collect my child and go home, but I had to stay and make conversation while Butter gnawed her way through the disturbingly solid cheese. And it unnerved me how keenly David would look at me when we talked, as if studying my reactions. I couldn’t just be casual with that kind of audience. That was the thing, too. David seemed to actually like me. He lit up every time he saw me on his doorstep. He’d offer me tea, or stuffed crust pizza.

David and Butter had their own lovefest. When I came to his house, she’d make a show of wrapping her tongue all over his hands and pant legs and giving him a long, meaningful look on the way out the door. But she seemed to take her reunion with me for granted. The first time she reentered my house, she went straight to the living room, climbed the couch, and assumed her position on the top, waiting for me to turn on the TV. I doted on her throughout my three-day stints, telling her “Mommy loves you the most” while feeding her a Quarter Pounder or peanut-butter-smeared carrot. I hoped she’d come to her senses and remember that she was really my dog, and we could end this whole charade. I could never suggest that we transition Butter back to her original home as long as she so clearly loved her second.

So on our dysfunctional family went, as fall turned into winter. Between exchanges, David would text me pictures of Butter, whom he continued to call “Everest.” He said he’d named Butter “Everest” to encourage himself to “dream high.” David showed me around most of his house, though there was one door in the back he didn’t open. The walls of the home were covered with pictures of things that inspired him: oceans, astronauts, Leonardo da Vinci. But any half-wit could have seen that this dog didn’t look like an Everest. When I first met her at the shelter, “butter” was what popped into my head. Her fur was whitish but turned yellow where it thickened in rough swirls on improbable parts of her body, like her right shoulder blade, or the top of her head. Her body lacked any organizing principle. Her front half was much stouter than the back. A dignified name like “Everest” just felt cruel. Butter lived joyfully as her worst self at all times, and I wished I could do the same.

I groused to my online therapist, Lanying, about the dog drama at every session, and one day she asked, “Do you think this is a situation you can change?” I had been trying to change the situation by buying my dog’s love back with beef, but didn’t feel right admitting that to Lanying. So I told her probably not. Legally, I didn’t think I had any claim against David.

“Is there a way you could change yourself in the situation?” she asked.

“I could try to approach David more like a friend and less like an enemy,” I said, then regretted it, because I would rather have brushed my teeth with a rusty nail than been friendly with David. But Lanying nodded and whisked her matcha harder, and I knew I had to try.

The next time I went to David’s house, I told myself to say one nice thing to him. One thing. If I made an honest effort, I could report thusly to Lanying, then nestle back into my resentment. I looked around David’s living room while he collected Butter’s favorite toys from the floor and saw a jigsaw puzzle on the coffee table. It was a Technicolor picture of Steve Jobs, made up of other, smaller pictures of Steve Jobs. “That’s a cool puzzle,” I said. My nice thing wasn’t exactly honest, but it was nice.

David stopped, rubber chicken in hand, and looked at me. His face spread with delight. “You think so?”

“Yeah. I like jigsaw puzzles.” That part was true. I liked to get a thousand-piecer and spread it on the floor of the bathroom, because my table was too small, and also because it incentivized me to finish the puzzle in one day, before my next shower. I relished the drama of racing against my own clock. Who needed team sports?

“You should see my Nelson Mandela,” he said, and spread his arms, flopping the chicken. Butter followed it with her head. “Four thousand pieces.”

Despite myself, I was impressed. But: “The Yamal Railway in Siberia,” I said. “Six thousand pieces.”

“Whoa.” His respect seemed genuine.

I peered more closely at Steve Jobs. “I think you’ve got a piece in the wrong place.” I pointed. “See where there’s a tiny sliver between those two? And the shade of magenta is off.”

He looked closer too, and actually gasped. “You’re right.” He removed the offending piece. “I can’t believe I made such a rookie mistake. You probably saved me hours of frustration. Wow!”

“It isn’t that big a deal,” I said.

“It is. I might have thought something was wrong with the puzzle and thrown the whole thing away. You have such a sharp eye. Incredible.”

I could feel my lips starting to turn and wrestled the smile back down, like it was a captive in the trunk of my car. “It’s no big deal,” I repeated. There was something warming about his naked approval. Like a dog’s.

I guess a lot of my hobbies were nerdy. Jigsaw puzzles, wall calendar collecting (dog pictures preferred), miniatures. I’d always loved miniatures: a perfect world I could control. But I chose miniature furniture, buildings, or animals, no people. Growing up, I liked dollhouses, but not dolls.

Still, of the handful of people I counted as true friends, most I had met through the online miniatures community, which was robust and political. I’d seen users lob all-caps curses over the question of whether plastic was permissible in a Victorian dollhouse. It was wonderful.

The r/miniatures subreddit was where I had met Flynn. It was rare to find a man in the miniature-sphere. At first I knew him as ArmchairEnthusiast3140, and his avatar was a photo of a tiny armchair he’d made, which I’d had to admit was clever. I’d been having issues with pieces in my Florentine streetscape fading, and he pointed me in the direction of a life-changing epoxy resin. Try Ultracast 6000. UV resistant. Doesn’t yellow. Self-leveling. It’s not available at Home Depot or anything, you have to order it from the manufacturer in Canada. But those who know, know. I expressed my gratitude, and a back-and-forth about Florence and the places we’d never been turned into a conversation about family, and he shared that his mother had recently had a stroke, and so I felt like I had to continue talking to him, though I didn’t want to, though the attention was nice, though I didn’t want to like it. So we kept talking, and I guess you could say we became friends. It was the best kind of friendship. One where I could shut my laptop and put him away when I wanted to be alone or reread his messages when I wanted that little warm ping, without bothering him.

I met Flynn about six months after I got Butter, which was right after my breakup with Benicio. Benicio and I hadn’t been that serious, but the breakup still drove me to the animal shelter in a storm of need and self-loathing. Benicio was kind to no end, and safe because I’d always felt slightly superior to him. He needed me to explain words like “tobiko” on the menu. He wore Crocs. Then he broke up with me.

So I swore off men forever (Lanying: “Do you know now what you’ll want for the rest of your life?”), dove into a very involved miniature recreation of an 18^th-century bookstore in Paris, and got myself a female dog. But the chats online with Flynn were harmless and gratifying. When his mother died, and later, when I lost Butter, we could pour our grief out to each other. He didn’t ask, “Is it possible for grief to be a place for growth?” He just said he was sorry. And once David was in the picture, I could grit my teeth through the pick-ups and the long days without my own dog in my own home, and vent to Flynn. I called David “dog dork” when I talked to Flynn, and he was always ready to listen.

How did dog dork do today? he asked when I was home with Butter that night, checking messages between painting the wood on a tiny half-timbered Tudor.

Better than usual. We actually have a hobby in common. At least that’s something.

See? Sometimes people surprise you.

I sat with my laptop on the coffee table. Above my shoulders, Butter was splayed over the top of the couch. Her wet toy kept flicking my ear as she mashed it. She was playing with Tube, her favorite possession. Tube was a cylinder of corded rope with strings on the ends and an embroidered face with an expression somewhere between surprise and orgasm. When Butter ran away, I’d purged my home of all her belongings, Lanying’s directive for clearing a path to healing. But I’d kept Tube, locking him away in a drawer in the bathroom, as if Lanying might sense his presence through Zoom. I’d take Tube out and smell his bedraggled face, just for a hit of the fading funk of my beloved lost girl. Now, miraculously, she was back. I turned my head and pretended to gnaw on Tube’s other end, growling through my jaws. Butter sneezed in delight.

Benicio had been nice. Flynn was nice. David, annoying as he was, was nice. Being friendly to him wasn’t so bad, and I supposed I should make an effort if we were going to be co-parents for the long haul. After all, Butter saw something in him. I resolved to keep an open mind to David.

Still—no man could ever make me feel like Butter.

“I have something for you.”

David’s words at my next visit struck trepidation into my heart. Had he saved me a cheese-stuffed crust, like he did for Butter? But he handed me a rectangular object from the side table by the couch. A jigsaw puzzle, made of wood and stained in a gradation of shades. It only had twelve pieces, but each appeared hand-carved, perfectly planed to fit together. “For me?” I asked.

“Yes. It’s not 6,000 pieces, but it’s a start!”

“Where did you get this?” It looked artisanal and expensive.

“I made it.” He stuffed his hands into his pockets, then removed them, and Butter forced her head through his legs to sit between his feet.

“You made this? It’s beautiful.” It really was. I didn’t even ask if there was cheese inside. “Did you do this all in the last three days?”

He shrugged. “I finished Steve Jobs, thanks to you, and needed something else to do.”

That night, while Butter flailed and snarled her way through a dream, I took the puzzle apart and put it back together, feeling the silkiness of the wood. It was a nice gift—too nice. What was David trying to do? Con me into gradually handing over Butter? Get in my pants? Make me feel bad for not liking him?

I knew my thoughts were too ungenerous to divulge to Lanying. I had no adequate cause to be mad at David, certainly not for giving me a thoughtful gift, and not even before that. His situation was the same as mine: he’d been going about life with his dog, then found that his dog was no longer just his, through no fault of his own. So I complained to Flynn instead.

Do you ever wish someone would just disappear? Not that they’d suffer or anything bad would happen to them. Just that it would be like they’d never existed.

Uh-oh. Who are you trying to make disappear?

Dog dork.

There was a pause before Flynn’s response.

What did he do this time?

Made me a jigsaw puzzle. Like by wood, from hand. I know, I know. It was nice. But now I feel some kind of weird pressure to like him.

Another pause.

I can see how you’d feel that way.

I’ve been hoping this whole dog-sharing thing would end, and it seems like he’s content for it to go on forever.

Another pause.

I just want my dog back, I added to fill the space. I got her back, but I didn’t really get her back. I don’t know what to do about it.

It’ll work out. Maybe you don’t have to do anything at all.

When David showed up at my door three days later, he seemed droopy and small. Normally he asked how my day was going, but this time, he didn’t. So I asked him instead.

“It’s been fine,” he said. Butter tried to climb him as he stood in the living room, but he barely patted her head, and she let her lumbersome front paws slide back down.

Perhaps I hadn’t been demonstrative enough about his gift last time. Demonstrativeness had never been my thing. Or did he expect a gift in return? A thank you card? Should the puzzle have pride of place on my mantel, next to my latest street creation?

I was about to thank him again, but he spoke first. “We both know this can’t go on forever. Two people who don’t live together and have no relation to each other sharing a dog—it’s not practical.”

If this man was about to try to claim my dog, I was prepared to grab my commemorative Alamo walking stick from the corner and use it like a katana.

Instead, he said, “You should take Everest.”

I didn’t correct the name. “Take her?”

“She was your dog first. Besides.” He tugged morosely at the end of his braided belt. “It’s the gentlemanly thing to do.”

“You mean just take her back full-time? No strings attached?”

“I’ll miss her, but…” David petted Butter’s head, and she drew one of his fingers up into her long lips and began gnawing on it like a corncob. His voice grew thick. “I’ll miss our slow walks and our cozy evenings. I’ll miss the way she inspires me. How she makes me think of planting a flag on a frosty mountain peak. She and I were going to do that together, one day.”

Butter’s eyes were closed as she snacked on the finger and one of her back legs was turned at a different angle than the rest of her body, like she forgot it halfway through a step. She would never climb Mount Everest. But could I take that dream from David? Could I make him spend silent nights alone, missing the warmth of a dog he thought he’d never see again?

“Don’t be a dumbass,” I said. It was costing me all my strength to do the right thing. I had no reserve for tact. “We’ll keep sharing her fifty-fifty. She seems happy enough.”

In the weeks that followed, I cursed myself twenty times a day for not taking my dog back and ditching David when I’d had the chance. But the more I fell into a routine with him, the less I thought about it. It began to feel like things had always been this way. And there were benefits to the arrangement. My vet bills halved. I had dog-free blocks when I could take overnight trips to national parks without worrying about Butter tumbling into a canyon. And David… I’m not going to say that I began to like him. Let’s say he grew on me, in the way of a wart. Maybe I got used to him. But there were also subtle changes. The turtlenecks disappeared and he replaced them with V-neck sweaters that gave him a mathematics professor look that kind of worked. I stopped smelling the greasy scent of pizza in his house, and once he even offered me my favorite brand of spicy feta dip instead. We exchanged gifts on Christmas: hand-carved bookends for me, an antique pipe for him.

It was almost nice, in moments, to talk to someone in person, not on Zoom or Reddit. I found myself sharing things with David—frustrations from my day, or childhood memories—that never came up with Lanying. David always greeted my appearance with such unguarded enthusiasm. Who wouldn’t feel a wee bit special? I was only human.

One night in late January, while Butter warmed my feet in bed, trying to chew her pink sweater off her body, Flynn sent me a message. I’m going to bite the bullet here and ask: how are you feeling these days about dating? Any more open to a relationship?

He’d asked a version of this question once before, soon after we started chatting. I was still licking my wounds from Benicio, and Flynn was just a rando online—I didn’t even learn his name until months later. It had been easy to say I wasn’t interested, and he didn’t pressure me, and was so friendly, and met me toe-to-toe on my love for miniatures. So I kept talking with him anyway.

Automatically, I started to respond in the negative to Flynn, but stopped. If Lanying were asking this question, looking me in my digital eyes, I wouldn’t be able to get away with a quick dismissal. Was I open to a relationship? That was still undecided. Was I more open to a relationship than I had been the last time Flynn asked, over a year ago—undoubtedly, the answer was yes. Perhaps only on a scale of “not” to “not very.” Nonetheless, a crack.

This was always the way. I’d have a relationship. Said relationship would end. I’d swear allegiance to aloneness. I’d sink into solitude like a luxurious, foamy bath. Then the tiresome need for human companionship, a vestigial imprint of the herd, would prevent me from being fully happy. A man would appear. And with the man I would go, like a dog returning to its vomit.

Still, there were plenty of reasons to keep that door shut on Flynn. He’d said he lived in Maryland. I had never even met him in person. And really, what was up with a man spending so much time on the Miniatures board on Reddit? If a guy was too much like me, how much fun could he even be?

Before I could take leave of my senses, I told Flynn I still wanted to remain alone, and I snuggled down to cocoon myself with Butter.

The next week, when I arrived at David’s house to collect Butter, the front door was wide open. On the stoop was a plastic bag with an overturned container inside, viscous liquid pooling out. I peered into the house. “David? Butter?”

Then I heard David’s voice from down the street. “Everest! Everest!”

I ran toward his small figure, which was darting back and forth at the end of the block, patting his leg. He turned, wild-eyed, as I came up. “She ran.” His voice was ragged. “I opened the door to get my soup delivery, and she saw some man down the street, and she darted for him. I didn’t see if she kept going this way or turned right or left.”

There was no time to deliberate. “You go straight. I’ll go left.”

As he took off his way and I mine, my breath was already sharp in my throat. I could hike for hours without feeling this way. It must have been from shouting Butter’s name, and from panic. I couldn’t comprehend that this was happening again. It was all too real. My body already knew the grooves of this terror—my nervous system lit immediately along the same path, like throwing a match onto a grid of gasoline. How like Butter to run to a man. What a stupid, stupid creature. If I lost her again, I’d die.

I stopped everyone I passed—a dad with his toddler on a tricycle, a cleaning lady trundling with her kit to the car—and asked if they’d seen a dog. Normally I would never have talked to strangers, but now it was easy. Nothing mattered but feeding my ravenous love.

At least this time, I wasn’t searching for my dog alone, and I wasn’t alone in my nightmare. The time before, as I ran solo through a crowded Austin park, yelling “Butter,” everyone looked at me like I was crazy.  If—she couldn’t—Butter disappeared again, David would know the same grief.

But if Butter were out of the picture, David and I would have no reason to commiserate, or communicate at all. Losing Butter would mean losing him too.

All of the reasons I’d had for keeping Flynn at a distance weren’t there with David. He was here and knowable. He was, if not enchanting or polished, at least warm. Could I go back to days alone and nights alone? To my sole comfort and consort being Lanying? I hated being alone, and I hated that I hated it.

I decided it, in a fit of adrenaline and violent dread: if we found Butter—when we found Butter—I was asking David on a date.

Where was David? Where was I? I realized I had no idea how far from David’s house I had gone. In my haze, I’d paid no attention to the street signs or what turns I’d taken. The neighborhood was a warren of Craftsman bungalows, built practically on top of each other, differently colored variations of the same Platonic form of a house. If I couldn’t find my way around here, Butter didn’t stand a chance. She’d get turned around looking for her own tail and loll out into traffic. I should have been tracking what ground I’d covered. I was wasting the only resource I had: time.

I turned a corner and was dismayed at first to not know where I was, then even more dismayed when I saw that this was David’s block. I was right back where I’d started. I cursed myself.

But then I saw something whitish and asymmetric moving on David’s front steps. It was Butter, licking up soup.

David heated up Campbell’s chicken noodle for the two of us back at his house, but I didn’t need a warming meal. The wool of my sweater was wet around the armpits from the frenzied chase. I put my bowl on the ground and let Butter have it, her second helping of soup that day, and I knew David wouldn’t care that she sloshed it all over the hardwood of his living room. We were both so relieved we were giddy. We kept catching each other’s eyes and laughing.

This was the time to ask him, while I was still in a lottery-ticket mood, and he was too. So was Butter; having finished her soup, she’d moved on to flipping Tube around in lazy ecstasy. It would be best for Butter, really, if David and I got along, maybe even one day shared a household. We could all go on walks together. Maybe that was the right place to start. Lanying would be so proud.

“I was thinking of taking Butter to the park tomorrow,” I began. David, whose attention was normally so fixed on me when we were together, was glancing over my shoulder to the back of the house. But I had to get this out. “And I wondered if you might want to—”

“One moment,” he said.

He rose from the couch and followed Butter to where she had tossed Tube. She was nosing her way past the back door, the one that was always closed.

I walked through after them. David straightened from picking Tube off the floor and seemed startled to see me.

“Wow,” I said, looking around. A fully kitted woodworking shop was stocked in the small room: boards and scraps of unfinished wood leaning against a wall, shelves floor to ceiling with papers and fabrics and bottles, tools arranged on a corkboard, and a cabinet with hundreds of tiny drawers. The air had a chemical smell, and fine dust covered everything. Except, arrayed in a tall glass cabinet, a gleaming collection of miniature furniture. I moved closer, and David made a staccato motion, then stopped. There were tables, beds, pianos, umbrella racks with umbrellas, Eames chairs and roll-top desks, all in minute, perfect detail. “Did you make these?” I asked. It was incredible. What were the odds that he shared my niche interest?

David didn’t respond. Butter was tugging Tube from his hand, but he was motionless, and pink around the nostrils.

I looked again at the collection, and I noticed a little armchair. A very familiar little armchair, one I had seen hundreds of times online. I looked back at the utility shelves and saw a bottle of Ultracast 6000 epoxy resin.

David jerked toward the door, but I blocked him. I grabbed a small saw off a worktable and shut the door behind me with my foot. Butter harumphed, excited.

“Explain,” I said, brandishing the saw.

I felt like an utter fool. It was amazing I hadn’t noticed the coincidences: that David did woodworking, and so did Flynn. That it was after I’d grouse to Flynn online about “dog dork’s” failings that David would change how he dressed or what he ate in front of me. That both were so devoted to me—me, who had rarely inspired devotion. I wondered for a moment why it had been so easy to like Flynn online and taken so long to like David in person. But I supposed people were always easier to like when they weren’t in front of you.

“I couldn’t simply give up after you said you weren’t looking for a relationship that first time,” David said. He kept tapping the worktable behind him as he talked. He seemed almost pleased to have been found out. “Online relationships are hard, and you’d just been hurt by that terrible Benicio. I knew I needed to interact with you in person for you to see how right we were together. I mean, how often do you find a single woman under the age of sixty on the miniatures subreddit?”

David explained that he figured out my last name by looking up my first name, which was part of my username, and my company on LinkedIn. I didn’t ask for his name until after he’d devised his plan, so he gave me a fake one. He moved to Austin—“everyone else was moving there anyway”—tracked me down, and lured Butter away at the park while I wasn’t looking.

“How did you get her to come to you?” I asked. I was almost trembling with indignation, but the saw made me feel powerful, like a mafioso.

“Pulled some ham out of my pocket,” he said, as if that were obvious. I remembered the times I’d seen David patting his leg, and how it always drew Butter to him.

He said he kept Butter (whom he still had the nerve to call “Everest”) for a year, so that he’d have had her the same length of time I had, and I’d have no reasonable claim to resist his notion of sharing her. He knew how to be patient, he said, and pointed to the meticulous miniatures as an example. Then, if we were sharing a dog, we’d have to interact. There was no way love wouldn’t blossom. Once the year mark passed, he “just happened” to be sitting with Butter on a bench he knew I passed regularly.

“And now here we are,” he said. His eyes were so wide I could see a rim of white below the irises. “We found Everest together not once, but twice. It has to be fate.”

“I found her twice,” I corrected. “You stole her once and lost her once. You know I have to report this to the police, right?”

“The police? No, no, they’ll never understand. We can keep sharing Everest. Even move in together—make our family whole. You want that, right? This can be our sweet story of how we met. Our meet cute. Our ham cute!” He laughed.

“You are entirely off your top,” I said.

“But think how Everest will miss me if I’m not around,” he said.

“Butter has been heartbroken by men before and survived. She’ll survive again.”

When the police came, David started chatting up the female officer and petting her K-9 before she put him in cuffs, and Butter rubbed herself sensuously on the male officer’s legs. More of the same, I thought. How predictable the world is.

Then, when I called the police department the next day for an update, they told me they had released David on insufficient evidence. That was it. He was out among us, crazy, unreformed, the one weird, hooked carrot rolling loose in the bag. And that’s how things would stay.

That night, I logged onto Reddit with fire in my fingers. If I couldn’t enact justice in real life, I would deliver it online. I’d share the whole sordid story. Expose “Flynn” to the loyal minions who upvoted his prescriptive bloviations. Blacklist him from the whole international miniaturist community. I opened a new post and paused. David could just make a new account. If I tried to expose him on Reddit, it could backfire and the mods might kick me off. And hadn’t I already won? I had Butter.

I could have opened an email to Lanying instead and requested an appointment the next day to unpack all this. But talking through it all with another human sounded laborious and embarrassing. Maybe I wouldn’t tell Lanying at all. Maybe I’d stop therapy entirely.

Maybe I’d never date again. What was the point? For another person, I would have to get out of my sweat-crusted cardigan and brush my hair and smile and set goals and share vulnerable secrets and expose myself to the ridiculous contortions of the human heart. Butter didn’t need all that. Butter would let me be my bad self.

I left the computer on the coffee table and sank back into the couch, let its lumps and dips and cockeyed coils give me a sort of half-assed massage, Butter looking down on me from the top, like a gargoyle. I thought I might never get up again.

I sat back up. A sickness penetrated my gut, and I recognized it as the too-familiar feeling of loss. My fingers drifted back to the laptop and opened the inbox with Flynn’s messages. The words I’d liked to reread on lazy mornings or lonely nights. Flynn—David—whoever he was when he was his best—was still here, all boxed up. Just seeing his armchair avatar made my ears ring pleasantly, Pavlovian.

I wasn’t going to message Flynn again, and I knew he was not really Flynn. I knew he didn’t actually love me in any meaningful or sane way, just like Butter may only have loved me when no one else was around with a stronger ham scent. But still… his slavish, yes, dogged devotion. The fact that David went to such dastardly lengths to court me was titillating. Love made people masterful and stupid. Okay, it wasn’t love. But the messages in front of me were at least a mimeographed version. No, I would never message Flynn again—but I could keep these missives from before it all went to pot.

I settled back down and drew the laptop onto my chest to read some old favorites. My stupid needy heart hammered. The sweetness was cutting, heightened because it had almost slipped from my grasp. I kept one hand on the computer and reached the other to rub Butter’s floppy nape. She sank into a dream, indifferent to my touch. I had everything I needed, for now.

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Sarah Archer’s debut novel, The Plus One, was published by Putnam in the US and received a starred review from Booklist. It has also been published in the UK, Germany, and Japan, and is currently in development for the screen. As a screenwriter, she has developed material for MTV Entertainment, Snapchat, and Comedy Central. She is a Black List Screenwriting Lab fellow who has placed in competitions including the Motion Picture Academy’s Nicholl Fellowship, the Tracking Board’s Launch Pad, and the Austin Film Festival. Her short stories and poetry have been published in numerous literary magazines, nominated twice for the Pushcart Prize, and reached the finals of the Doris Betts Fiction Prize. She has spoken and taught on writing to groups in several states and countries, and interviewed authors around the world as a co-host of the award-winning Charlotte Readers Podcast. You can find her online at saraharcherwrites.com.

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