Foxfire, Esq.

Book 2 | Chapter Eighteen

“... and a big thanks to Columbia for sponsoring this episode of Upscale Appalachian, if you’re on the market for any new camping, hiking, or cold-weather gear, you can’t go wrong with Columbia. Anyway, this is Matt, signing out... alright, that’s another episode in the can, thank fuck we can go back to using actually good gear.”

“Matt, buddy, ya gotta stop taking sponsorships from shit companies, the free stuff you get isn’t even worth the—”

Casey reached forward and slapped the space bar on the laptop, sparing both of our ears from yet another round of dudebro banter.

“I hate these people,” they said, blinking at the frozen image on the conference room’s projector. “They’re saying one thing for the episode, and something else entirely once they’ve wrapped? How is this not false advertising?”

“Well—”

“I mean, sure, fine I already know how it isn’t false advertising, but come on! They accepted money to do a review of a company’s stuff, used the stuff, gave it a good review, and then they, they just, ugh!” Casey lowered their head into their arms, and groaned wordlessly into the table.

“Welcome to the shitty part of lawyering: going through evidence with a fine-toothed comb. Trust me when I say video is the worst, so you're getting a pretty rough taste of it right now.” I patted them on the shoulder as I stood up, stretching my back before stepping away from my chair. “Casey? Take five. Grab a snack, get in a quick walk, drink some water. Don’t feel like you need to start back up without me.”

“Running an errand?”

“Email for another case came in while we were watching that... that,” I waved in the general direction of the projector. “Gotta jump on it real quick. Shouldn’t take too long, don’t worry.”

“One more hour of this schlock, then lunch break?” they asked, hope shining in their eyes.

“One more hour, then lunch. So pick out where you wanna go, my treat.”

I was rewarded with a nice big grin from Casey as they pulled out their phone to check which lunch spots in the area they hadn’t been to yet. Seeing that my junior was well in hand, I exited the conference room, went back up a flight of stairs to the floor with all our offices on it, and retreated to my office, where I collapsed into my desk chair with a sigh and closed my eyes. Much as it was good that Casey get exposed to the less interesting parts of the job early enough to be ready for it, there were less awful ways it could have happened. Your average person might look at boxes and boxes of documents in sheer terror, but reviewing actual paper documents wasn’t that difficult, and you had the built-in progression of making a pile smaller. Plus, by the time you got partway through the pile of documents, you were likely to develop a shorthand way to identify relevant versus irrelevant documents, speeding things up even further.

Watching raw video footage, on the other hand, had none of that. The minimum time investment was the length of the footage. Even if you sped up the playback to one and a half times or double speed, you still had to actually watch it.

And Rachael Cruz’s ex-husband had provided us with an absolutely miserable sixty-four hours of raw footage. These glamper assholes had recorded from the moment they woke up in the morning to the moment they settled into their thousand-dollar heated, insulated, cushioned tents. And all of it just showed how incredibly fake these people were. Then again, it wasn’t like they were being subtle about it — I mean, really. Upscale Appalachian? UpscaleAppalachian?

Yeah, no, those idiots may have made a halfway-decent effort of looking like they were roughing it, but realistically? None of them would survive even the NMR’s severely watered-down survival training.

Suffice to say, if Casey hadn’t decided that we needed a break, I would’ve been the one to force the issue. The poor audio encoding was awful to listen to, and would’ve given me a headache if I’d listened to it for much longer. Seriously, you’d think the same dillweeds who spent that much money taking all the rigor out of camping would at least spend a couple hundred bucks on halfway decent microphones, but no. Of course not.

... then again, my standards for what constituted a quality microphone were probably rather exacting, but, eh. Details.

Regardless, two shakes of this fox’s tail later, I was mentally recovered enough to get to the other matter at hand for this wonderful late Thursday morning: following through on my promise to Lady Liberty, which would also let me get those stolen — ah, correction, ‘temporarily appropriated’, not stolen — documents back into NMR custody. As expected, I’d been able to plug the certified mailing barcode from the envelopes into the USPS website to get tracking data, and figure out where they’d been sent from. For some of the older ones, this stalker had... what, used Amtrak to start up near Massachusetts, sent everything for the New England area there, and then headed back down from there? It didn’t make much sense to me, but then again, stalkers weren’t exactly rational people, so there was that.

So yeah, those weren’t helpful. The more recent mailings, though? Well... those all came from the same post office: Washington Square down in DC. And that wasn’t very useful on its own, admittedly.

Now, the fact that it was the same post office that the firm used? That, on the other hand, was useful. It was also the same post office where I’d given out autographed photos and Japan-exclusive merch for several of the managers’ kids and relatives around the holidays, which meant that they were more than happy to see if any of these tracking numbers’ transactions had been marked as odd or suspicious, no warrant or subpoena required.

Sure enough, they had been, and all for the same reason: the buyer had rendered payment with a series of prepaid Visa debit cards. And, as luck would have it, one enterprising employee who went above and beyond — a new hire, go figure — had written down the card number for me.

I’d sent that off to my old friend Amir, who then reached out to a friend of his over at Visa’s corporate office, and managed to dig up exactly where this prepaid debit card had been sold.

All of this in exchange for three bags of expensive coffee beans, set to be delivered sometime next week.

Remember, people: sometimes it’s not what you know, so much as who you know and have beenpoliteto. Politeness costs you nothing, and reaps countless dividends in the long run.

Now, unfortunately, this was where my telephone and favor chain ended. I had a card number, the location it was bought, and the date of purchase. But that was it. Now, you might be asking yourself, “how is she supposed to take that and use it to get customer information from a major retail corporation, all without a search warrant?”, and... well? Assuming you have the right set of facts, a little bit of experience, and a touch of creativity, it’s really not that hard.

You just pick up the phone — or turn on speakerphone, in my case — call the specific store at which the purchases in question were made, ask to speak with the store manager on duty, and...

“Yes, good morning. My name is Naomi Ziegler; I’m an attorney calling on behalf of a concerned parent?”

See, that? The lawyer card? That’s the bait. The moment you pull the lawyer card, the manager cannot hang up on you, since — ugh, fine, yes, the manager could, in theory, still hang up on you. But they won’t. Why? Because they know that if they hang up on you, your next call will be to corporate, and they just gave you their name.

Anyways! Now, once you have them stuck on the line, you need to set your hook...

“Oh, no, it’s not anything that happened to them or their daughter at your store — well, kind of, but not exactly. You see, my client’s daughter has been getting some, ah, how do I say this... inappropriately amorous attention from a grown man, and from what I’ve been able to find out so far, he’s using pre-paid Visa debit cards to try and avoid detection... yes. Yes, purchased at your store. It was, let me check... three of them this past February 14, Valentine’s Day, and another five on Black Friday last year. If you need the card numbers, I have them all right here, starting with — oh, you don’t need them? Oh, that would be wonderfully helpful of you, thank you. Yes, of course; my email address is...”

And just like that, the catch all but reels itself in for you. Good, old-fashioned social engineering; works like a charm. It took a few minutes for the email bearing the next piece of information to come in, and I clicked it open to find my next clue on the step to... huh. Wow, uh. Okay, maybe I’d been giving this creep a bit more credit than I should have.

Yes, he’d used cash to purchase the debit cards... but he’d put in his rewards program information when buying them.

So I had a full name and address.

I shot that information off to Megan’s personal cell phone so that she could get things rolling on her end — while she hadn’t been able to investigate the matter, I was giving her actionable information which she was obligated to follow up on as part of her job. Loophole abuse, sure, but you didn’t get to a position like hers without a thorough understanding of what loopholes existed and how to use them. We wouldn’t know for another few weeks whether this had worked or not, but I had a feeling we were all set. It would be as simple as making sure every post office in the area was given a photo from our stalker’s latest government-issued ID, and ensuring that they turn away anybody matching that description who tried to send mail to an NMR PO Box.

Unfortunately, preventing any future mailings was still just step one. Once Megan let me know things were all set on that front, it was time for step two: reverse engineering how he’d been tracking Mariem’s location in the first place. Now, I did have an idea where to start on that front, but—

“Naomi!”

“Eep!”

My office door suddenly burst open without knocking, which sent me all but leaping out of my chair in shock. I tried to calm my racing heart and looked towards the door, where Casey stood desperately trying to stifle their giggles by masking it with a sheepish expression. It wasn’t working, no, but it was enough to get my heart rate back down to normal.

“Casey, I’m a little high-strung, please knock next time,” I said as I let out a little nervous chuckle of my own.

“S-sorry,” they murmured, finally managing to pull back on the giggles long enough to talk. “That was just — wait, shit! Almost forgot why I came up here, come on, I gotta show you!”

“Huh?” I lowered an ear in question even as I stood from my chair. “Show me what?”

“Well, I was a little eager to get to lunch sooner, so I started watching the next hour, and—”

“Casey.” My ears went as flat as my tone, and I crossed my arms, fixing him with a rather unimpressed expression. “I said to take a break. Pressing on with the review is not taking a break, nor should you have been doing that without me.”

“Yeah okay sure I’m sorry, but come see this first, then yell at me!”

“Okay, but what’s ‘this’?” I asked.

“I can’t just tell you that!” Casey fired back. “I know what I think it is, but I need you to look at it and tell me what you think it is first, otherwise you’ll be biased!”

“... you know what? That’s actually fair,” I admitted, letting my ears pop back up as I tabled the ennui for now. “Lead on.”

Casey drew a couple of concerned looks from the secretary bank as we walked past on our way to the stairs, which had me wondering just what they’d found. I mean, I’d drawn plenty such looks during my early years at the firm, but I was also probably the first Moonshot any of them had interacted with on a personal basis. That was different. Hopefully it was just me worrying, but I really didn’t want the secretaries gossiping about Casey before they’d even properly started their career.

By the time we got back to the conference room, Casey had properly calmed down, and grabbed the little remote we could use to control the laptop’s playback before standing next to the projector screen. They clicked a button, and the screensaver faded to be replaced by VLC Media Player, the second day’s footage still loaded up.

“Alright, so this guy,” Casey used the remote’s built-in laser pointer to outline the man on the left side of the frame, “is our client’s husband Erik. The guy on the right is Matt, the cameraman is Kyle. This is maybe two minutes after we paused to take a break.”

With that context given, Casey pressed play.

“—see the Cubs? Man, who’d’ve thought they’d still be undefeated going into week three?”

“Come on, man, you spent like half the damn drive out here talking about the Cubs, give it a fuckin’ rest!”

“Don’t be a fuckin’ hypocrite, Kyle, you wouldn’t shut up about Los Doyers all last year and none of us said anything, I think you can let me have this.”

“Yeah, but I didn’t even start until my boys had practically clinched playoffs already! C’mon, Erik, back me up here!”

“Man, I ain’t got time for this, I gotta shit so fuckin’ bad!”

“Whoa whoa whoa, take that faaar away from camp!”

You might be reading a pirated copy. Look for the official release to support the author.

“Yeah, yeah, don’t shit where you eat, we all fuckin’ get it, Matt!”

The one person of the three we cared about left the frame, and Casey mercifully paused the video so we didn’t have to listen to any more of these wannabe jocks talking sportsball.

“Obviously, the only one of the three we care about just walked off, so I jumped ahead five minutes at a time until I saw he was back in frame, then backed up another five to check when he reappeared,” they explained, which had me nodding; it was a good call, and a sign of better instincts. I’d still want to give it a full listen in case Erik had been talking to the others from off camera, but for an initial check, this was fine. “I saw him another thirty minutes further into the video, so I jumped back five from there, and...”

Casey hit play, and I watched the same side of the frame our mark had exited from, all while tuning out the banter. I’d barely been able to parse sports even when it was semi-mandatory to keep my father placated, and after eighteen years or so of only looking up sports for general knowledge or alibi checks, the in-depth chatter went completely over my head, ears and all.

After two minutes of this, though, I saw our mark come back in on the left side of the frame. He had something in his hands, a roll of toilet paper, which he tossed underhand over at—

Wait!

I slammed my hand on the laptop’s spacebar, backed it up a bit, pressed play, and watched it again. Then I backed it up yet again and watched it a third time.

“What was that?” I murmured to myself, though out of the corner of my eye I could see Casey starting to grin.

The projector’s image wasn’t detailed enough. Too muddy. I needed something crisper, cleaner.

I needed to see this thing clearly.

A quick flip through the settings menu swapped the display back to the laptop’s screen and pushed the brightness to max. There were a few playback hotkeys, which I used to jump back five seconds, then one second at a time until — no, damn it, he was already winding up for the throw there, back one more second — then used a different one to advance one frame at a time. I usually hated having to deal with too high of frame rates, it always made the motion feel wrong, but for the first time ever I was glad that even off-the-shelf consumer electronics could record video at sixty frames per second and 4K resolution.

All those detailed pixels and glorious frames let me see every little bit of what our guy had been holding, from the moment it peeked out from behind the roll of toilet paper to the instant it sailed on its own ballistic arc, air resistance having long since slowed the toilet paper’s flight.

It was a classically “ruggedized” device, bumpy rubber and blocky construction meant to hide somewhat delicate electronics within. It had a grayscale screen, the type that hadn’t seen regular use for a while now because they weren’t pretty to look at, but consumed almost no power and lasted for ages.

But most important was the button layout on its front: a set of arrows, a green button, a red button, and a twelve-digit numeric keypad.

“A satellite phone,” I gasped out, hardly able to believe what I was seeing. “That fucker disappeared for a twenty-seven-minute ‘shit in the woods’, and he brought a satellite phone with him!”

“I thought so too! I just didn’t want to say anything yet!”

“That was a good call,” I told them, though the compliment was more on reflex than anything. I was too busy thinking about what I had to do next, what this meant for our case, what I needed to tell Cruz—

... damn it.

“Casey?”

“Yeah?”

“You don’t have a Barbri class until tomorrow, right?”

“No, why?”

Perfect.

“Okay, um...” I thought for a moment about the order of operations here, ears twitching as I made a mental list and put it all in order, from most to least desirable. Better to handle the stuff that didn’t leave me feeling awful first. “You took a note of the timestamps and which file this was, right?”

“Yeah, of course,” Casey said.

“Alright, so, um. I need you to stop by the supply room and grab a few of the unused firm-branded thumb drives, along with some blank CDs, I’m pretty sure the computer in your office has a CD burner in it. Get the clip, snip the five-second block we found here with the sat phone getting tossed in the middle of it, copy it to each of the thumb drives, and burn it onto the CDs. If you don’t know how to burn a—”

“I know how to burn a CD.”

“Okay, perfect, but ask IT for help if you run into trouble keeping the quality the same,” I told them. “Anyway, while you get that handled, I’ve got to make a few calls.”

“Who to?” they asked.

“The Chief Judge to schedule an emergency status conference, hopefully for tomorrow and if not then for Monday, the US Attorney’s Office so they know and make sure to bring their copies of these video files, and...” I signed. “And the client. To see if she’s free for us to come by and show her what we found.”

“You... don’t sound happy about that.” Casey’s response was halfway between a statement and a question, hesitant and uncertain.

“I’m not,” I grimaced, ears pulling tight against my head in anxious anticipation.

After all, crow was never a fun meal to choke down.

Phone calls were made. Voices were raised. Copies of the relevant clip were run off, both in thumb drive and in CD form, because the courts can never decide which one they want to accept. Appointments were made.

And lunch was eaten. That one was very important.

Casey and I took the metro over to the NoMa-Gallaudet metro stop rather than trying to drive over here in rush hour traffic again. I caught a few interesting looks and a fair number of phone cameras pointed my way, but aside from that, it was a thankfully uneventful trip over. I needed that relative tranquility, especially with whom we were about to speak with.

And especially with what I felt the need to say, no matter how much it pained me.

We made our way into the building and up to Rachael Cruz’s temporary apartment dwelling without any fanfare, and when I knocked on her door, the other Moonshot opened it without so much as a snide comment or stink-eye this time.

“Gonna tell me what’s so important that I had to clear my schedule?” she asked once both Casey and I were inside. “I had a special guest booked for my podcast. You’re lucky he let us reschedule.”

“Your English teachers ever tell you that old ‘show, don’t tell’ maxim?” I asked, answering Cruz’s question with a question.

“What’s that—”

I held up one of the thumb drives Casey had prepped, cutting off whatever my client was going to say. Taking the hint, she walked over to the pre-furnished apartment’s kitchen table and grabbed her laptop, one of those folding numbers with a screen that could fold completely over on itself. She unfolded it from a tablet to a proper laptop configuration, slid the thumb drive in, and gave me a meaningful look. Casey and I took the hint, pulling out chairs to join her at the table even as the computer's file explorer seemed to just open up on its own.

“Two video files,” Cruz murmured, eyes flickering behind closed lids as they read something visible only to her. “4K resolution, sixty frames per second, recorded with a 23.6 megapixel sensor, bitrate of one hundred megabits per second. One’s an unedited file recorded from a GoPro HERO 9. The other’s...” She frowned, jaw tensing as she let out a small, frustrated murmur. “Extracted from the same file, cut down with Windows Photo Viewer. Seriously? That’s your video editing software of choice? Fucking amateur hour here.”

“Open it,” I told her, even as Casey bristled at the insult Cruz had so casually tossed their way. “The bigger one. The timestamp you’re looking for is six hours, forty-one minutes, twenty-six seconds.”

Cruz didn’t offer a verbal response. Her eyes flicked back open and landed on the screen, which went dark before coming back on with much brighter and more vivid colors, along with some filter that seemed to sharpen everything on the display — or maybe she’d removed a filter that softened everything, that made more sense. An instant later, my beloved VLC Media Player opened, and the full video file opened at the exact timestamp I’d specified. How the hell...? I always had to start at the beginning, but she could just go straight there?

Technopaths, I swear...

“That’s the asshole’s buddy,” Cruz said, gaze locked to the image onscreen. “Matt Whitman. Fucker spent half the wedding staring at my tits. Don’t see my dear hubby though.”“His other buddy, Kyle something—”

“Kyle Christner.”

“Him, yes,” I nodded. “He’s the cameraman. As of this timestamp, it’s been twenty-seven or so minutes since your soon-to-be-ex-husband said he was off to ‘do his business’ in the woods,” I lightly tapped the bezel on the important side of the screen. “Watch here.”

Cruz leaned in closer to the screen, and then the video started to play. Ten seconds in, Erik Anderson entered the frame, and tossed the toilet paper and satellite phone.

The video paused. It backed up three seconds, and played that clip again, then a third time, then a fourth. Casey and I watched as a picture-in-picture opened seemingly of its own accord, and duplicated that particular section of the screen for another few rewatches.

The clip went back to the start, then advanced frame by frame until it had the clearest possible view of the device. The picture-in-picture window expanded, that section of the video with the satellite phone growing until it encompassed the whole screen, and the image zoomed in, out, and in again, settling at an absurdly detailed picture with absolutely zero visible pixelation or other degradation, and by this point Casey and I had both leaned in closer, absolutely enthralled with what we were seeing.

Several other windows opened and closed faster than I could identify before a new app stayed open long enough for me to actually tell what it was: Adobe Photoshop. None of the little bars or menus with all the tools were visible, but even without any of those, the image seemed to refine itself before our very eyes. Rotation, selection, color adjustment, white balance change, cropping, layering, and a dozen other things I just wasn’t experienced enough with the software to identify, all of these things happened at the speed of thought. Twenty seconds later, an image of just the front of the satellite phone rested onscreen, before even that disappeared into a haze of other windows.

Four different Internet browser tabs opened at the same time, though it wasn’t one I recognized, nor did it have any visible interface beyond the address bar and almost unusable browser tabs at the top — a custom build? One that only Cruz could use, optimized for her specific use case? Maybe. Regardless, multiple tabs all ran at the same time, but Casey and I could only see the main one, which held a reverse image search.

The exact model of satellite phone came up almost instantly. Then it flipped to the next tab, which was open to a ProtonMail account showing an invoice received from what could only be a satellite phone subscription plan, going by the name, then another tab showing the plan’s cancellation, and the last one showing confirmation of a hold placed on charges from the provider by their bank.

All of this took maybe a minute or two. What would’ve taken at least an hour of work from either Casey or me, and that was if we got lucky. All that work, completed in moments.

“That stupid thing was on our wedding registry,” Rachael Cruz murmured, practically bolting from her chair to pace around the kitchen as her fists clenched so tightly that I worried she’d draw blood. “Said it got destroyed out west. Bear tore up their camp, wrecked the damn thing to get to their food. Fucker moped about it for weeks.” She laughed, dark and rueful. “Fuck. Fuck! He didn’t file for divorce until four months later! That, that — I should—”

“Do nothing, please, for the love of God!” I interjected.

All the lights in the apartment flickered a dim and angry red as Cruz leveled a horrifically wrathful glare at me. My right ear swiveled Casey’s way as they swallowed hard and murmured something about skies and nets, but my attention was still mostly fixed on keeping my client from blowing up her own case.

“We have a meeting with the Chief Judge and the assistant US attorney prosecuting your case scheduled for Monday at 7am,” I told her, keeping my tone as level and neutral as I could while slowly, slowly lowering my ears out to the sides of my head. It had the desired effect; as I continued to speak, that deliberate calmness combined with the sight of something sinking lower along a pseudo-horizon brought her temper from a rolling boil to a bare simmer. “Before that happens, I’ll need you to run off... five? Five paper copies of each record that satellite phone ever produced, along with any emails or text messages sent about it.”

“... that’s it?” Cruz asked. “Just print off some damn paper, hand it to the feds, and I’m... free?” All the anger was gone now, evaporated into nothingness. She sounded dazed, almost; confused, uncertain. Her eyes were almost unfocused, staring off into the space above my head. “Just — just like that?”

“There’s one... no, two more things,” I corrected, a sinking feeling in my gut as the worst part of this task approached. “First, I have a lead on where the money went, and a hunch as to who has it for the moment. And second...” I sighed, my tail flicking in agitation behind me. I didn’t want to do this. I really didn’t. But my pride, my ethics, my honor demanded it. Whether she knew it or not, regardless of the fact that there’d been no consequence to it, I’d done this woman wrong. There was only one way to make amends that felt like it was enough to me, and even though it’d caused no lasting harm this time, I couldn’t — no.

I wouldn’t let myself run away from yet another of my fuck-ups.

And so I got up from my chair, stood in front of Rachael Cruz, and kneeled before her in a proper seiza.

“Naomi?” Casey murmured, voice quiet from confusion.

“W-what the—?” Cruz stammered, stepping back from my kneeling stance. “What are you—”

“Rachael Cruz. From the moment I received your case from the court,” I said, looking her in the eye, “I assumed you to be guilty. I looked at your history, both as a civilian and a heroine, and treated you as though your guilt was a foregone conclusion. I premised my work on the assumption that you were guilty, knew you would inevitably be found guilty, and were simply preparing me to be the sacrificial fox on the altar of your appeal. Were it not for the diligence and careful work of my junior here, I would almost certainly have missed the evidence that proved your innocence. For that...”

I closed my eyes, tried to hold back the grimace, and bowed. I bowed so low that the tips of my ears brushed against the floor of her temporary apartment.

“I don’t ask for your forgiveness. But for my reckless arrogance, and the disservice to you that was only barely averted, you...” I swallowed, the words tasting like ash in my mouth. “Y-you have my... my deepest apologies.”

The words hung in the air, with only an awkward growing silence to meet them. I counted to five before rising from my bow, and carefully stood.

“If there is nothing else,” I said softly, voice just above a whisper, “then I shall see you at the courthouse on Monday.”

Casey caught the hint and stood. Their movements were slow and cautious, as though Rachael Cruz was a predator about to pounce on any sudden motion, but the woman showed no signs of moving, or even saying anything. When I chanced a glance at her, she just stood there, supporting her weight against the counter as she looked between me and the computer screen.

With no final remarks forthcoming from our client, I offered her one last respectful, deferential nod before showing Casey and myself out.

Casey followed me down the hall without a word, only breaking the tense silence once we had to wait on the elevator.

“What the hell?” they murmured, looking between me and the hallway. “What was that about?”

“That...”

The elevator dinged, buying me a precious few seconds to figure out how best to phrase this. But by the time the elevator doors closed, I still didn’t have an elegant way to put things, which left... just saying it flatly.

“I fucked up, Casey,” I admitted, swallowing down the tense, anxious feeling still trying to rise up my gorge. “Prior bad acts aren’t usually allowed as evidence for a reason, and you just saw why. I made the exact fuck-up responsible for making so many people think jury trials are at best a bad joke.”

“What mistake?” Casey asked as the elevator doors opened.

“Guilty until proven innocent,” I said as we headed towards the door onto the street. “I didn’t listen to the evidence. I just... I’d already decided that she did it. The signs have been there since the beginning, but I didn’t want to see it.”

“... oh.”

The two of us just stood there on the sidewalk for a moment, processing the weight of it all. The sun was shining. Birds were chirping. A few kids across the street were looking at my tail with stars in their eyes.

“You know what you need?”

“Hm?” I looked at Casey, lowering an ear in question.

“Ice cream,” Casey declared. “You need ice cream. Come on!”

“Casey, that’s not—” I protested, but they simply walked across the street towards the Ben & Jerry’s behind those same staring kids I’d noticed a moment ago, and whose parents were trying to corral them into the ice cream shop. “Casey!”

“C’mon!” they beckoned, all the tension from mere moments ago sliding off their shoulders as they practically skipped towards the smell of sugar and cream. I let out a loud, long-suffering sigh, but couldn’t help but chuckle a little at Casey’s antics. All I could do was shake my head and follow them across the street to where the ice cream waited. And about fifteen minutes later, I had to admit: I did need the ice cream.

But I definitely could’ve done without the four ice cream cone-wielding preschoolers trying oh so carefully to sneak in and get their hands on my fur.