The talking started in my kitchen, at 9:12 PM, over a bowl of plain boiled chicken I had shredded by hand because the internet told me dogs under stress shouldn't have seasoning, and because some small, petty part of me enjoyed the idea of Julian Cross eating unseasoned chicken off a plate on my floor after a lifetime of expensing steak dinners to the firm.

He'd been silent the whole drive home. Silent in the elevator, silent while I fumbled my keys one-handed with a tote bag full of furious Pomeranian, silent while I set him down in the middle of my living room rug and he did three tight, outraged circles before sitting, bolt upright, glaring at me like I was a line item he intended to dispute.

And then, over the chicken, very quietly, in a voice that sounded exactly like his own voice except coming from somewhere it had no business coming from, he said:

"You have got to be joking."

I dropped the fork.

"You can talk."

"I can apparently talk," he said, and I want to note, for the record, that even mid-transformation, even four feet tall and covered in fur, he managed to make it sound like an inconvenience I had personally caused him. "Which is more than I can say for the last two hours, during which I attempted to speak to you no fewer than eleven times in that car and produced, as far as I can tell, nothing but barking."

"You were talking this whole time?"

"I was trying." I want to note that he said this with the specific wounded outrage of a man who has never once in his career had to repeat himself, and who was discovering, for the first time, exactly how disorienting it is to be fluent and completely unheard at the same time.

"Why can you talk now?"

He considered this, and I watched something move across his face — his dog face, which I want to say for the record is an expressive face, more expressive than his human one ever was, possibly because nobody had ever coached him on it — something that looked, unmistakably, like him running through several answers before landing on the one he actually believed.

"I don't know," he said. "But I noticed the pattern before you did, so let me lay it out. In the car: nothing. In the elevator, with your neighbor's dog barking two floors down: nothing. Just now, alone, in this kitchen, with the door shut: everything. I believe the operative variable is alone. You and me. No witnesses. No other people. I'd wager no other animals either, given the elevator."

I sat down on my kitchen floor, which is not something I do, generally, being a woman who owns exactly one blazer per personality she needs that week and does not, as a rule, sit on floors, and looked at him for a long moment.

"So you can only talk to me when we're completely alone."

"So it would seem."

"That's — inconvenient."

"Inconvenient," Julian repeated, in a tone that suggested the word did not begin to cover it, "is one word for the fact that I am currently a small white dog who cannot speak in front of another living soul, cannot type, cannot dial a phone, and cannot, as I discovered forty minutes ago in your bathroom, open a door, all because you—"

"Because I what."

He stopped. I watched him stop. I want to be honest that I have replayed this exact moment more times than almost any other moment in the last fourteen days, because it was the first time I saw him choose not to finish a sentence he clearly had every intention of finishing, and I didn't understand, at the time, what that cost him.

"Because you had a reaction," he said instead, carefully, in the voice of a man picking his way across a floor he suspects is made of ice. "To the review."

"You told me I needed to smile more."

"I've said that to plenty of people."

"I'm sure you have."

"It wasn't meant as—"

"I don't actually want to do this right now," I said, and meant it, because I had, at that point, been awake for sixteen hours, cried exactly zero times, screamed exactly zero times, and had, instead, spent the entire evening being extremely calm about the fact that I had committed what I strongly suspected was a felony against my own manager. "I want to establish rules. That's what I want to do right now. Rules."

I want to note, for accuracy, that I had never in my life negotiated the terms of a cohabitation before, with anyone, let alone a man who used to sign off on my expense reports and was now sitting on my kitchen floor demanding structure the way he used to demand quarterly projections. I had dated exactly enough to know that most relationships develop their rules slowly, over months, through small accumulated friction — whose turn it is to do the dishes, how loud the television gets after ten — and here I was, fourteen hours into knowing Julian Cross as anything other than a professional obstacle, trying to build an entire operating framework for an interspecies emergency in under twenty minutes on a kitchen floor that badly needed sweeping.

Julian, to his enormous credit — and I will give him credit where it's due, throughout this account, because I think it matters that I do — sat back on his haunches and said, "Fine. Rules."

"You can only talk to me alone. So in public, you're a dog. Just a dog. No barking things that sound like corporate feedback, no trying to communicate via meaningful eye contact, nothing. If anyone asks, you're—" I stopped, because I had not, until that exact second, thought this part through at all.

"I'm what."

"You're a wellness dog."

"A what."

"A therapy animal. For the office. I'll say you're — I don't know, I'll figure it out tomorrow. Rule two: you do not, under any circumstances, tell anyone what happened. Not your family, not Garrett—"

"Who is Garrett."

"Nobody. Not yet. Rule three—" I ran out of rules, momentarily, and sat there on my kitchen floor across from a Pomeranian who used to sign my expense reports, trying to locate a fourth rule, and what came out instead, quieter than I meant it, was: "Rule three, we have fourteen days. My family can brew a reversal, but it takes fourteen days, and for those fourteen days I don't have any magic either, so whatever happens, we're doing it the normal way. No shortcuts. Just — figuring it out. Like everyone else has to."

Julian was quiet for a moment. Then, in a voice that had lost some of its earlier outrage, replaced with something more careful:

"You lost your magic too."

"For fourteen days, yes." I want to note, for the record, that I had considered, briefly, not telling him this part at all, on the logic that Julian Cross armed with the knowledge that I was currently as ordinary as anyone else on the planet felt, somehow, like handing over a piece of leverage I wasn't ready to give up, though I could not, even at the time, articulate exactly what leverage a five-pound dog was in a position to use against me.

"That seems like a significant detail to have led with."

"I'm leading with it now."

"Right." He looked down at the chicken, then back up at me, and I watched him decide something, the way you can sometimes watch a person decide something even when the person is currently a dog. "Fourteen days. No magic. A cover story involving the phrase 'wellness dog.' Anything else I should know before I go to sleep on what I assume is going to be your sofa and not a bed, out of spite."

"There's an audit," I said, remembering the email that had come in around six, the one I'd read twice and then closed without responding because I did not, at the time, have the emotional bandwidth for one more variable. "Compliance flagged something on the Whitfield numbers last week — before any of this. Some guy named Garrett Okafor is coming in Thursday to look at the books."

Julian's ears — and it is genuinely strange, writing this, to describe a man I have worked adjacent to for three years in terms of his ears — went very flat against his head.

"Garrett Okafor," he repeated. "From corporate compliance."

"You know him?"

"I know of him," Julian said, in the voice of a man remembering something specific and unpleasant. "He doesn't miss things. That's his entire professional reputation. He doesn't miss things, and he asks the one follow-up question you were hoping nobody would think to ask."

I looked at the dog that used to be my boss, sitting very upright in my kitchen at 9:40 PM, and felt the full architecture of the next fourteen days arrange itself into place with the specific, sinking clarity of a woman watching a spreadsheet auto-populate with numbers she already knows she isn't going to like.

"Great," I said. "Fantastic. Add it to the list."

"What list?"

"The list I'm starting right now," I said, standing up, brushing chicken residue off my one pair of at-home sweatpants, "of things that are going to go wrong before this is over."

Julian, watching me from the kitchen floor, said nothing for a moment, and then, very quietly, in a tone I did not yet have the tools to correctly interpret:

"For what it's worth. I am sorry. About the review."

I did not answer him. I turned off the kitchen light instead, and went to bed, and lay awake for a long time listening to the small, unfamiliar sound of a dog settling onto my sofa in the dark, thinking that thirteen days was still a very long time, and that I had, historically, never once been good at things that required me to simply wait.

I got up once, around one in the morning, ostensibly for water, actually to check, in the dim light from my refrigerator, that he was still there — still breathing, still real, still exactly as absurd and complicated a problem as he'd been three hours earlier — and found him curled into a tight, unfamiliar circle on the sofa cushion, one ear twitching at some private dream I would never have access to, and I stood there longer than the water justified, thinking about the specific strangeness of being, apparently, the only person on earth who this particular man could currently speak an honest sentence to, and what that was going to mean for both of us over the twelve days I still had left to figure it out.