Married By Mistake

Chapter Six: The Dog Walker's World

Jax's POV

Might be a problem was doing a lot of work in that text, and I knew it the second I hit send.

I didn't explain further because Waffles had just tried to eat a dead pigeon off the sidewalk. By the time I wrestled that particular crisis under control, my phone had buzzed twice with Elena's replies. Both some version of what does that mean in increasingly smaller font as her patience ran out.

I'd deal with it later. I always deal with things later. It's practically a system.

"You're doing the thing where you talk to yourself," Mrs. Alvarez said from her porch, watching me with a mug of tea and the unhurried judgment of a woman who's raised four kids and buried two husbands.

"I talk to the dogs. It's different."

"You were talking to your phone."

"The phone was rude to me first."

Mrs. Alvarez's dog, a fat, elderly pug named Biscuit, waddled down the steps at a pace that suggested he had somewhere to be and no intention of hurrying. I clipped the leash on and matched his stride, which had become, over two years, its own kind of meditation.

Nobody expects anything from you on a slow walk with a fat pug. Maybe the only hour of my week where that's true.

I used to think silence was the enemy. Every teacher I ever had wanted more out of it, more precision, more feeling, more of whatever they thought I was holding back.

Biscuit didn't want anything except to sniff the same fire hydrant for four straight minutes. I could live in that kind of quiet forever.

"You look tired," Mrs. Alvarez called after me.

"Rough night."

"Good rough or bad rough?"

"Undetermined."

She laughed, the kind that turns into a cough, and waved me off down the block.

My route took me past six houses, four dogs, one very judgmental cat I'm not technically supposed to be checking on but do anyway. And the corner where a new coffee cart had set up, oat milk lattes priced high enough to make my eye twitch.

I was three dogs deep into my rotation, juggling leashes like a man with questionable ideas about scheduling, when someone called out behind me.

"Jackson?"

I didn't turn around right away. Nobody calls me Jackson. Not my brother, not my clients, not anyone in six years of my carefully built, thoroughly unremarkable life.

The name landed somewhere old and unguarded. A door I thought I'd nailed shut a long time ago.

I turned around anyway, because ignoring it would've been worse.

A man crossed the street toward me. Mid-fifties, gray at the temples, wearing a coat that cost more than my monthly rent. Something about the shape of his face was familiar in a way that made my stomach drop before my brain caught up with why.

"Sorry," I said, keeping my voice easy, keeping the three dogs between us like a small, chaotic buffer. "You've got the wrong guy."

"No, I don't think I do." He tilted his head, studying me with the narrowing focus of someone subtracting years off a face. "You look exactly like, God, it's been what, eight, nine years? Vienna. The semifinal round. I was on the panel."

My pulse picked up in a way that had nothing to do with the dogs pulling at their leashes.

"I really think you've got me confused with someone else," I said. My voice went flat and careful, the way it always goes when the old world reaches a hand up out of the ground and grabs my ankle.

"Jackson Romero. I'd bet my career on it. You had that piece, the one you wrote yourself. The judges were still talking about it years later—"

"I've gotta get these guys home, man. Sorry." I was already moving. Tugging the leashes gently, angling my body away in a motion so smooth it looked almost natural.

"Wait—"

"Really sorry, can't stop, dog emergency."

I didn't look back to see his face. Whatever expression had settled there, confusion or certainty or something in between. I kept walking, fast, three dogs trotting beside me in three different rhythms, my heart going hard against my ribs in a way that had nothing to do with the pace.

I didn't slow down until I'd turned two corners and the street behind me was empty of anyone who might recognize the way my hands were shaking.

By the time I got the dogs home and made it back to my own apartment, my phone had three more texts from Elena. Each one shorter and more clipped than the last, ending in a line that felt less like a question and more like a demand.

Elena: Jax. What did your brother say? Is this bad?

I stared at the screen for a long moment, thumb hovering.

Marcus had heard about the courthouse from a friend of a friend, and he was already spinning it into something bigger than it was. He always does. He's spent six years being the only person who knows the whole story, and every time it threatens to leak, he acts like it's happening to him too.

I typed back the only version of the truth I was willing to give her.

Jax: Someone recognized me today. Not because of us. Old stuff. Not a big deal.

I hit send before I could second-guess it. Set the phone face down on the counter.

Didn't notice, until I looked down a minute later, that my fingers had already started tapping something complicated and precise against the countertop.

A rhythm I hadn't played in six years.

One I hadn't meant to remember.