I Was His Waiting Room novel · Chapter 9 of 32

Chapter 9: The Video

I read the comments.

Of course I read the comments.

Niall sat beside me on the tailgate and didn't take the phone away, which I noticed.

This is why you never trust the friend who's always helping.

Imagine stealing from a woman in a wheelchair. Imagine being that jealous.

Someone find this firehouse. I want to talk to her.

By the time he drove home, someone had.

My brand-new business page had forty one-star reviews by midnight. None of them had ever been inside.

At one in the morning Kerry's new door camera caught a car slowing on Gibson Street.

A man leaned out and yelled a word at the bay door that I won't write down.

Juniper slept on my feet in my childhood bedroom.

I didn't sleep at all.

On Sunday the video passed five hundred thousand.

Kiera had cut it well. The tears, the empty balcony, her hand on the bare spot where the dog bed used to be.

She never said my last name. She didn't have to. She'd tagged the firehouse.

Ronan's company account had shared it with a heart.

On Monday morning I took Juniper to the vet in Quincy before class.

The vet was a brisk woman who'd known Juniper since her puppy shots.

She put her on the scale and didn't say anything for a second.

"Fifty-six pounds," she said. "She was sixty-eight at her last checkup with you. Two years ago."

"Can you put that in writing?"

"I'm putting it in her chart with a time stamp and a photo. And I'm writing 'neglect' in the notes, in capital letters."

At nine o'clock the first class of Costigan Service Dogs was supposed to start.

At eight forty, the phone calls started instead.

The eight-year-old's mother, first. Pepper's family.

"I'm sorry," she said. "I just need to ask. Is any of it true?"

"Juniper was on a scale in Quincy an hour ago, twelve pounds underweight. That's what's true."

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