Biscuit made the living arrangements harder than any spreadsheet could. Celeste asked to take him to Marianne's house for a weekend, and I agreed after we discussed his medication, food, and routine. On the first evening without him, I kept hearing phantom nails on the kitchen floor. I went to the door three times because I thought he'd scratched to be let outside. It was embarrassing how much I missed a dog who had once refused to sit beside me unless Celeste was out of the room.
When Celeste returned him Sunday afternoon, Biscuit tore into the apartment and ran straight to his food bowl. He looked relieved to be home and then confused when Celeste left without staying. She stood on the porch watching him through the open door, her face soft with the same uncomplicated affection I'd admired when we first adopted him. For a moment, she and I were just two people who loved the same animal. Then she asked whether the dog could live with her permanently, and the separation settled back around us.
We discussed it through our lawyers because I didn't want another argument where Biscuit became proof of which person loved whom more. Celeste's housing situation was temporary, her work schedule uncertain, and Marianne already had an older dog that struggled with other animals. My work hours weren't perfect, but I had established help from a neighbor and could keep Biscuit in the home he knew while the rental arrangements were sorted. We eventually agreed that he would stay primarily with me and that Celeste could request visits by prior arrangement. The agreement wasn't a statement about who was the better person; it was an attempt to make the most stable decision for the dog.
One evening I found the adoption photograph in a kitchen drawer. Biscuit was a frightened little creature in it, all elbows and oversized paws, sitting between Celeste and me on a bench outside the rescue center. She had one arm around him and the other around my back, and my smile looked so open that I barely recognized it. I placed the photograph in a box of things we would sort later. I didn't throw it away because the photograph showed a day that had been good, and I wanted to remain a person capable of remembering good days accurately.
My work became both refuge and inconvenience. Emergency refrigeration doesn't pause for personal grief, and customers rarely have the patience to hear why a technician seems distracted. I still had to calculate refrigerant loads, review wiring diagrams, and explain delays to managers who had inventory warming behind locked doors. Some afternoons, the concentration helped because the problems had measurable causes and finite solutions. Other times, I returned to the van and felt the sadness rush back as soon as there was no machinery demanding my attention.
Luis noticed more than I wanted him to. We were replacing a motor at a distribution center when he asked whether Biscuit was still living with me. I told him yes, and he nodded as though that answered a much larger question. After a few minutes he said his parents had divorced when he was a teenager, and he'd spent years believing he could have prevented it by being easier to live with. He wasn't offering advice so much as telling me why he disliked hearing people blame themselves for someone else's dishonesty.
"I know I could have been a better husband in some ways," I said. Luis looked at the service panel and tightened a fastener. "Probably," he answered.