Wise advice? He’d always thought so, but right now it was advice he was planning to ignore.

‘What did you call her?’ he asked, and she hiccupped on a sob and tried to glare at him. It didn’t come off. How could it?

‘Manya’

Why was she glaring? Did she think he’d mock?

Maybe she did. He knew instinctively that Tori was assessing him and withdrawing. As if he’d think she was stupid-when stupid was the last thing he’d think her.

‘Why Manya?’ he asked, searching for the right words to break through. ‘What does it mean?’

‘Just…“little one.” It’s from the language of the native people from around here. Not that it matters. It was only… I talked to her.’ She sounded desperate again, and totally bewildered. ‘I had to call her something. I had to talk to her.’

‘I guess you did,’ he said. And then, as she still seemed to be drawing in on herself, he thought maybe he could make this professional. Maybe it’d make it easier. ‘Do you know why she died?’

‘No.’ She spread her filthy hands and stared down at them, as if they could give her some clue. She shook her head. ‘Or maybe I do. She’s been under stress for months but I thought we were winning. I knew she wouldn’t be able to go back to the wild, but there are sanctuaries that’d take her, good places that’d seem like freedom. And she was so close. But one tiny abscess… It must have been the last straw. She was fine when I checked on her at seven, and when I checked at eight she was dead. Everything just…stopped.’

‘It does happen,’ he said softly. ‘To people, too.’

‘Have you had it happen to patients?’ she managed, and he knew she was struggling hard to sound normal. Her little dog nosed forwards and she picked him up and held him against her, shield-like. He licked her nose and she held him harder.

The dog was missing a leg, he saw with a shock, and his initial impression of him as an old dog changed. Not old. Wounded.