Emily took one step.
Then another.
Titan stayed still.
When she reached him, she held out her fist. He sniffed it and looked at me.
“Visit.”
He leaned forward.
Emily touched his forehead.
“Thank you for squishing me.”
Karen laughed through tears.
I had to look away.
Animal control eventually identified the snake as a captive species that did not belong loose in a frozen Seattle park. Officers searching the brush found part of a broken plastic enclosure behind a maintenance shed. There was no owner information, and the investigation never established who abandoned it. That frustrated me more than I expected. I wanted a person to blame, a clean cause, something I could place at the beginning of the chain.
My supervisor reminded me that not every danger came with a name.
“You have the part you can use,” he said. “The animal was removed. The park was searched. Your team learned from it. Don’t turn an unknown owner into another thing you carry forever.”
He knew me too well.
Carrying things forever was one of my specialties.
The night after the incident, my wife found me sitting on the kitchen floor beside Titan at two in the morning. I had replayed the body-camera audio until the words lost shape and became only sound.
Shoot my K9.
She took the phone from my hand.
“Stop listening.”
“I need to understand it.”
“You understand it.”
“I ordered him killed.”
“You ordered people to protect a child when you believed he was attacking her.”
“I was wrong.”
“Yes.”
Her refusal to soften the word surprised me.
“You were wrong. Then you saw new information and changed what you were doing. If you want to be ashamed forever because you were not omniscient for five seconds, I can’t stop you. But don’t pretend that’s accountability. Accountability is what you do with the mistake.”
Titan rested his chin on my thigh.
I looked at him.
“What if someone had fired before I changed the order?”
