Vanessa Kimball breathed slowly, tapping her fingers on the steering wheel, and waited for the final track on her Sounds of Essences of Lifetimes of Relaxation CD to drift to a meandering close. She'd been sitting in the parking lot for almost ten minutes at this point, but she'd also promised Donut she'd give the damn CD a try, and he was beaming out at her from behind the glass of the front doors of the building, so. Another two minutes of whale sounds and vague babbling brooks awaited.

Still drumming on the steering wheel, she glanced around the parking lot. One or two unfamiliar cars, although those probably belonged to the volunteers. Still early in the day, and they'd shelled out money for a cheesy radio ad advertising their 'pre-owned and affordable cats with no purchase financing!' that was set to air later that day, so that'd probably draw in a few people. Nothing to worry about yet. Just a quiet morning. Sure.

She was about to break and reach for the stack of papers she'd been editing for a physics student who had a particularly hot-and-heavy relationship with a thesaurus when the CD finally burbled and whined its way to a close. She took a breath, hit the eject button, and resisted the urge to snap it in half on the spot. Once it was safely ensconced in its clipart-laden jewel case, she reached back to grab the empty carrier in the backseat, a donation from her aunt, and straightened up, kicking the car door shut as she went. There was just enough of a chill in the air to make her wish she'd brought her jacket, but the skies were clear, and hell, maybe it'd warm up before the day was over.

"Pretty relaxing, right?" Donut called as she stepped through the doors. The little jingly bells had broken off a while ago, but she still heard them in the back of her head, a weird non-echo. "How do you feel?"

"Super relaxed," Kimball said, moving up to lean on the front desk across from him. "I am so relaxed right now that I can't even express my level of relaxation."

"Aw," Donut said. "Not so big on the CD?"

Kimball sighed, holding the case up between two fingers. "I appreciate it, Donut, I really do. Maybe some of us just aren't meant to relax."

"Blasphemy," muttered Grif, from where he was leaning back in a chair just out of sight of the front door, reading what looked like one of Simmons' comic books and crunching down on a handful of cookies that Kimball fervently hoped were meant for humans and not dogs.

"That's totally fine, Kimball!" Donut announced. "You hold on to that CD just in case, and we'll come up with something new in the meantime. Doc knows some really great relaxation techniques!"

Kimball blinked, trying to reconcile her mental picture of the shelter's intense resident veterinarian with ocean waves and soft rainfall. "Dr. Grey... relaxes?"

"What? No, no, the new guy! DuFresne! Vet assistant you hired last week, you remember him?"

"Oh," said Kimball. She vaguely recalled a nervous, new-agey type who jumped every time a dog barked. "Oh, good, that makes so much more sense."

"Yeah, he's super nice, I'll be sure to tell him you're interested in cleansing your mind!"

Kimball managed a faint chuckle as she hefted the dusty carrier over to one corner of the room, to be disinfected by whichever bored college-student volunteer they'd managed to rope into the cleaning shift today. "Well, I can tell you right now, working here some days I need the brain bleach."

Donut's mind shrugged off analogy and double-entendre like a duck shrugged off water. He clicked his tongue disapprovingly. "Bleach is a little harsh, and not at all eco-friendly! Working in an environmentally conscious field like this, you should always be aware of that."

"Right," Kimball said. "How could I have forgotten." She managed to push the carrier up on top of the teetering stack, then took a step back and eyed it critically. "Hey, Grif?"

"Busy!" Grif called, turning a page.

"Can you get some of these disinfected? We're gonna need them to take the cats to their next vet appointment, and I don't think we'll want to wait for cleaning shift to show up."

"No, see, I'm on the dog side," Grif said. "Can't help you. Wish I could, I really do, but I can't get all those prissy, sensitive cats riled up with the dogs' actually-gives-a-fuck-about-you slobbery ways. Besides, there could be an adoption any time now, and they'll need me. Urgently."

"Grif," Kimball said, warningly.

He groaned and shuffled into view, still clutching the comic book in one hand. "I don't get how you can make a volunteer job that I am volunteering for seem like the sort of position where I can get actively threatened into doing work."

"Does Simmons know you just got chocolate on his comic book?" Kimball crossed her arms. "I could see him getting a little annoyed at that. If someone were to tell him."

Grif glanced down at it, then back up at her with narrowed eyes. "See, you raise a good point, and I'll just. I'll just go ahead and drag these carriers outside to clean them."

"Good," Kimball said, and reached out to grab a swipe of hand sanitizer from the dispenser on the counter before elbowing her way through the door into the cat side of the shelter.

The Purrfect Harmony Animal Shelter had the dubious distinction of being the third-largest animal rescue in the county, with around fifty cats and fifty dogs in residence at any given time. It was also a small facility, a building that Kimball and three friends had invested in together in their ambitious and philanthropic post-college days. The other three had backed out, one by one, and suddenly a little project that was meant to be a sideline on her CV had become a full-time job. A full-time job, of course, that paid about as much as a part-time job. Thank goodness for credulous physics students with deep pockets and poor grammar who believed her when she said she was a qualified editor with ten years' professional experience and a Master's degree.

The cat side of the shelter had always been Kimball's domain, and once she'd found someone willing to take her meager financial offering to head up the dog side, she'd moved to working there full-time. Splitting her time hadn't been pretty; she still tried not to think about some of the adoptions that were approved or fell through the cracks when they really shouldn't have. But now that she was more settled, things were stabilizing. They had an actual, qualified vet on staff. They had just hired their second veterinary assistant. They had a handful of regular day-to-day volunteers, a couple of fosters, and a steady stream of rotating college students who needed to fulfill extracurricular requirements and were happy to do the grunt work for a week or two.

Now all they needed was for people to, you know, actually come in and adopt the animals.

"Miss Kimball!"

Kimball turned from her contemplation of one of the free-roam rooms—Princess Fluffypants was hunkered down with her ears flattened and seemed about ready to swat at the inquisitive Bob The Cat—to see Katie Jensen standing next to her, clipboard in hand, hair pulled back into neat, tight braids and a beaming smile on her lips. "Hi, Jensen. You don't need to keep calling me 'Miss'. We seem to have fallen into calling each other by our last names here, and that's weird and formal enough as it is."

She didn't miss the way Jensen's face fell a bit at her use of the word 'weird' and mentally chastised herself. But Jensen bounced back, smiling a little more cautiously. "Sorry, ma'am. Kimball. Um. Palomo and Bitters are on shift, and Smith's in the back giving Tangerine her shots."

"Good," Kimball said, and pushed into the room, mostly to distract Princess Fluffypants from her new prey. She bent down beside the cat and made a show of checking her long fur for mats or tangles—as though Smith the Ever-Vigilant Veterinary Assistant would let something like that slide. Princess Fluffypants suffered the inspection in silence, allowing Bob The Cat to creep away and hop up into a cage. "No members of the public in the building?"

"Nope," Jensen said. "I mean, I'm sure more will come along soon!" She sneezed loudly, grimaced, and reached out to disinfect her hands again. Kimball had been worried the first few times Jensen had reacted like that around the cats, but had been hastily reassured that Jensen was absolutely not allergic to cats. Definitely not. At least, no more than she was allergic to everything else. "Sorry. Matthews is coming in soon. So's Vlb."

Kimball glanced up. "Beg pardon?"

"Haha," Jensen said. Her skin was too dark to show a blush, but damned if it wasn't trying. "What? No, um. Matthews and um. And Volleyball. That's what I call her. I don't know her real name. She always forgets her name tag. She plays volleyball a lot. And um. She plays volleyball."

"Okay," Kimball said, hiding a smile. Princess Fluffypants, upset at the lack of attention, trilled and butted her hand with her head until Kimball relented and scratched her behind the ears. "Hey, Jensen, can I ask you a favor?"

Jensen straightened up. "Oh! Yes, ma'am, Kimball, absolutely!"

"Why don't you show Volleyball the ropes? It looks like it'll be a quiet day, and you should probably get some more managerial experience."

"Yes!" Jensen coughed. "I mean, uh. Yes. Yes, that is a thing that I can do." She paused at the doorway. "Oh, and you know how you approved a couple of new volunteer applications? Should be coming in today as well. They must've put in pretty good apps!"

"Great," Kimball said, and watched Jensen leave. Once she was gone, she leaned in to Princess Fluffypants and whispered, conspiratorially, "Nobody reads the damn volunteer applications. We need all the help we can get, we're not gonna be picky. Don't tell anyone."

Princess Fluffypants blinked, slowly.

"You're so good at keeping secrets," Kimball told her, and gave her a pat before getting to her feet and moving back into the hallway, reaching for another squirt of hand sanitizer with a grimace. She knew it kept the cats from sharing germs—and dealing with the last round of URIs had been enough to make her want to put each cat in its own individual protective bubble—but surely the gunk had by now seeped through her skin and replaced her blood with something that killed 99.9% of bacteria. She could probably make a decent living as a superhero with a power like that.

She paused at the door to the Cattery, where the majority of the facility's cats were caged, and made a face at her reflection in the glass. Already punchy five minutes into the day. Good start.

She pushed in through the door and was greeted by a cacophony of meows, which meant that Ellie had started yowling and had gotten all the other cats riled up. Palomo was standing in front of Ellie's cage and appeared to be deep in conversation with her. "Like, I know you're all angry and everything with the world and, like. Sometimes I want to meow at everything too? So I do? But people kind of look at me funny? So. Maybe not the best approach. Just stop meowing? Have you considered trying that?"

"Oh my god, Palomo," Kimball said, and reached past him to the open next cage, grab a kitten, and put it into Ellie's cage with her. As it settled in to nurse, Ellie gave a contented rumbling purr and stopped yowling. "She's still weaning them, but it's okay to give her one every now and then to keep her calm. Once the kittens are weaned and she gets spayed, the yowling should die off. Okay?"

"Ohhh," Palomo said, as though Kimball hadn't shown him this trick two weeks ago. "That makes sense."

"I heard a cage open back there," Smith called from the back of the room. "Sanitize before touching the next cat, please."

"I swear he has eyes in the back of his head," Kimball said, and winked at Palomo as she moved down the row of cages to grab yet another dollop of sanitizing goop.

"That seems anatomically unlikely!" called a particularly chipper voice. "Although it would probably make for a pretty cool science experiment."

"No experimenting on the cats, Dr. Grey," Kimball said, rounding the corner to see Grey giving Tangerine a shot while Smith held the cat steady.

Grey looked genuinely hurt. "I'd never experiment on these animals."

"Sorry," Kimball said, startled at the reaction. "I was just making a bad joke."

"It's fine!" Grey grinned, and gently rubbed at the spot where she'd injected Tangerine. "Besides, I thought we were talking about experimenting on Smith!"

Smith didn't so much as flinch, but his determinedly pleasant smile got a little more determinedly pleasant.

"This place is so weird," muttered a new voice at her elbow, and Kimball turned to see Bitters standing at her side, hands behind his back, rocking on his heels. "Hey."

Bitters actually seeking her out to say hello was an event so unusual as to be recorded in the annals of history. Bitters looking nervous while doing so ramped the weirdness factor up to eleven. "Hi," Kimball said, cautiously. "Everything okay?"

Bitters shrugged. "Eh."

Kimball squinted at him. He was about as inscrutable as her seventeen-year-old niece, and he had to be a half-decade older at least. "If I go in to check the census spreadsheet in the kitchen, will you follow me in a noncommittal way until you finally decide to say what you want to say?"

"That is how I operate," Bitters said, perfectly deadpan, but he couldn't quite hide the flash of relief in his eyes.

"No crises?" Kimball asked, turning to Grey.

Grey's grin was in no way dampened when Smith's grip on Tangerine slipped and the cat landed a solid scratch across her arm; she just gently scruffed the cat and put her back in her cage, then reached for a patch of gauze to stop the bleeding. Smith, inured to Dr. Grey's mannerisms through over a year of experience, had to know that it would be pointless to apologize, although he did flinch sympathetically. Grey beamed. "No crises. Everyone's in good shape! Max had his kidney results come back, and he's stabilizing, so I think we'll be able to reintroduce him into the shelter population soon!"

"That's great news," Kimball said, already shifting and rearranging cages and supplies in her mind to try to make room for one more. "C'mon, Bitters, let's walk in this general direction to talk so you can maintain your emotionally distant persona."

Bitters shrugged, stuffing his hands in his pockets and slouching after her into the kitchen, their makeshift office. He waited until she was halfway through checking the list of intakes for the week before saying, "So I don't want to do the Braun adoption."

Kimball glanced up from her laptop. "Okay. We'll give it to Jensen. Her schedule's pretty open."

Bitters stared at her. She stared back. Bitters said, "I mean, it's not that I can't do it. It's that I don't want to."

"Okay."

Bitters narrowed his eyes. "Look, I just. It's depressing as fuck, okay?"

Kimball wondered if she could get away with secretly pulling up the Braun file on the laptop and getting up-to-speed without losing her appearance of infallibility. Probably not, the way the day had been going so far. "Jog my memory?"

"Old lady knows she's dying in five or six years, wants an old dying cat to keep her company until she goes." Bitters grimaced. "Fuck that."

"Okay," Kimball said. "I get that it's a hard case. Has she picked a cat?"

Bitters shrugged. "Not really. She just comes in here and hangs out with them. We don't have any sickly older cats that fit the bill."

"You heard Grey. Max is coming back from the vet," Kimball said. "He's a sweet cat, but he's probably only got a couple years left at most. Can she handle the vet bills?"

"Her son's a vet," Bitters said. "He'll make house-calls."

"Okay," Kimball said. "I'll give the file to Jensen."

Bitters shifted his weight. "Okay."

"Okay."

A moment passed. Kimball glanced up. Bitters was still standing in front of her, fidgeting determinedly. "So," he said. "I just don't want you to think I'm." He stopped, chewing on his lower lip. "I can take the file."

Kimball cocked her head to one side. "Okay?"

He heaved a breath. "Yeah."

"Good," said Kimball. "Let me know if you run into any more trouble, all right?"

"Yeah," said Bitters again.

A massive crash made them both jump, followed by a wave of babbling voices and barking dogs out at the front desk.

"Dog-walkers are back," Bitters said.

Another crash, this one sounding a bit more expensive.

"Caboose is back," Bitters added.

Kimball closed the laptop, took a deep breath, and tried to think of whale noises and wide-open seas. "We'd better check it out."

The front desk was a disaster. The first feature that drew the eye was that one of the two glass doors leading to the outside world was at the moment not serving its function very well by virtue of being on the ground in a million pieces. No fewer than five dogs were leaping eagerly around the room while Caboose and Sarge chased them down. The dog-side volunteers were a low grumble of activity on one side of the room, quickly hushed when Kimball walked out from the cat side. She immediately caught Grif's eye and followed his guilty look to where the cat carriers were scattered over the glass.

"Grif," said Kimball. Even the dogs were calming down; her voice dropped into the silence like a stone.

"Okay, look," he said. "This is absolutely, totally, definitely not my fault. E-except for the part where I maybe didn't get the carriers all the way outside to rinse them off and uh. Maybe just stacked them by the door. A little. It was an honest mistake!"

"The puppies were really excited," Caboose said in a stage-whisper.

"Is it always like this?" whispered DuFresne to Donut, behind the front desk. Kimball saw Donut nod.

"Grif! You useless, insubordinate oaf!" Sarge, expertly pulling a particularly grumpy doberman to heel, spun to jab a finger into Grif's chest. "Can't you go one minute without destroying everything?"

Behind him, watching the proceedings with his back to the wall and arms crossed, Lopez muttered, "Si está dormido..."

Grif gave Sarge a half-assed shove. "Back off, old man! If you weren't playing fetch with half a tree and throwing stuff at the door, this never would have happened!"

Simmons, the organization's de-facto financial consultant, was standing next to Grif with a look of worried calculation on his face.

Kimball turned to look at Sarge, who raised one finger, opened his mouth, and then wisely thought better of speaking. "Nobody's hurt?" she asked, and waited for the general grumble of confirmation. "Grif. You are gonna wash those carriers out by hand, and you are damn lucky I'm not making you use a toothbrush." Over Sarge's beginnings of a gloat, she added, "And you're cleaning up the glass, Sarge."

"I can help!" said Caboose, and ran back through the door to the dog side with his charges, plus Sarge's. The entire room gave a brief sigh of relief when he remembered to open the door before running through it.

Kimball clapped her hands. "Okay, people, back to work. We'll get this sorted out. Simmons?"

"Present!" Simmons was a reedy, nerdy-looking guy, a perpetual student not because of any particular love of his chosen field, whatever the hell that was, but because he got so nervous taking tests that he just kept putting them off, and had been doing so for the past eight or nine years, as far as she could tell. He was also, Kimball had discovered, surprisingly good at keeping the shelter's finances straight, as long as he wasn't under any particular stress. Like, say, the stress you feel in a room full of broken glass...

"C'mon to the back with me, let's talk finances." There wasn't actually a door between the back rooms and the front office, but a few feet of added distance made a huge difference when Sarge was booming orders to Grif.

Simmons followed her, a little nervously. "Uh," he said, "I don't know how much something like this costs, but we don't have much in the budget for it. Or, uh, anything. Haha. If someone gave us a dozen doors to sell, we'd probably still be in the red."

Kimball took a breath, rearranged some personal finances in her head, and resigned herself to editing an extra dozen research papers written by incoherent physics students every week for the next... ever. "I'll cover the door out-of-pocket, Simmons."

"What on earth is going on here, Miss Kimball?"

Kimball bristled at the new voice, felt her shoulders stiffen and fists clench instinctively. Great. With Jensen, the 'Miss' was a charmingly nervous little slip-up. With Donald Doyle, it was a calculated, condescending insult. And it figured that Doyle would choose today to actually be on time for his shift to supervise the dog side. She turned and plastered a pleasant smile on her face. "Doyle."

"I leave for one evening and the building is broken!" He made an inchoate gesture at the door. "I mean. What kind of business are we running?"

"For the seventeenth time, it's not a business, it's a non-profit," Kimball said, pleasant smile slipping. "Which you'd know if you'd offer more assistance in the grant application process."

"Or if you paid for anything out-of-pocket," Simmons muttered, so quiet that only Kimball could hear.

Doyle straightened up, trying to regain some of his offended dignity. "I understand that it's a difficult process for one who may not have the, ah, needed experience when it comes to transferring large sums of money."

"No large sums of money here," Simmons grumbled. He was rapidly becoming Kimball's favorite volunteer.

She took a deep breath, leaning against the employee mailboxes, and reminded herself that flinging Doyle through the other glass door was probably the impolitic thing to do, considering that his wealthy family occasionally deigned to make donations to the shelter. Bare-minimum stuff, judging by how much they had—Kimball had googled them out of curiosity and had gotten a pretty good ballpark figure—but still. Better than nothing. And he wasn't completely inept when it came to running the bureaucratic side of the dog adoptions...

"Okay," Kimball said. "Here's what's going to happen. I'm going to buy a new door. Sarge is cleaning up, nobody got hurt. We are a completely, one hundred percent professional organization."

Simmons was staring in horror over her shoulder. "Grif!" he screeched, his voice rising half an octave. "What did you do to my comic book? Is that chocolate? That was a first edition!"

"Miss Kimball," Doyle said, "I hardly think—"

"That's the whole damn problem, isn't it?" Kimball said, which was also probably impolitic, but all things considered, she didn't really give a damn.

"I did not come here to be insulted by you! Why you don't just sell the damn building off and cut your losses, I'll never know. The pitiful stipend you offer me to be your employee is so low as to be insulting! If the Doyles didn't have a long history of volunteerism, I wouldn't even be here!"

"Oh, and it must be so crushing to have to fall back on the six-figure monthly allowance your parents still give you."

"As a matter of—"

"Excuse me."

The voice was cool, crisp, and eminently professional. It was also entirely unfamiliar. Kimball took a breath and turned around and tried to picture exactly what a newcomer's first impression of the shelter would be.

Broken glass littering the ground. A missing door. Dusty cat carriers strewn everywhere, some with broken doors hanging off their hinges. Volunteers loitering in the front entrance. A former drill sergeant grumbling and trying to sweep up glass with a dustpan, occasionally letting out his anger by stomping it into finer dust. And, of course, two grown men wrestling on the front desk over a comic book.

Kimball pushed the hair out of her eyes and beamed. "Welcome to Purrfect Harmony Animal Shelter."

There were two newcomers, a man and a woman. The man was looking down at the broken glass with a furrowed brow, confusion plain on his face. The woman squared her shoulders. "Vanessa Kimball, I presume?"

"Oh," said Kimball, and let the overly bright smile drop off her face in favor of a more natural expression. "The new volunteers. You can call me Kimball. We tend to go by last names or nicknames here, so."

"Carolina, and this is my coworker Wash," said Carolina, without missing a beat.

"Um," said Wash, now staring at Grif, who was keeping a flailing Simmons away from him by virtue of one hand planted in his chest. "Okay," Wash said, and apparently decided to leave his commentary at that.

Kimball gathered her wits and gave them an appraising look. Both tall, athletic. Wash looked to fit in with the twenty-something crowd of regular volunteers, age-wise, but Carolina had to be well into her thirties. Carolina also had a massive bruise purpling across her forehead that she'd made no effort to hide; Kimball made a conscious decision not to stare. Not the usual college kids. Huh.

Kimball straightened, gestured helplessly at the mess all over the floor. "Well, you're not exactly seeing us at our best, here. You'll have to forgive me, I haven't had a chance to re-read your applications. What was it you were interested in doing?"

"I'd like to help out with the cats," Wash said, instantly. Carolina gave him a little sidelong glance, and Kimball thought she caught a glint of humor in it. "Uh. If I could."

"I think we could manage that," said Kimball. "I'll have Jensen and Bitters show you the ropes today. Carolina?"

"Wherever you need me," Carolina said. There was something strange about her posture, Kimball thought, but it wasn't until she beckoned them both over with her to the cat side and saw Carolina execute a perfect turn on her heel that she realized: Carolina was trying her damnedest not to stand at attention. Interesting.

Kimball smiled as Wash paused to stare in a window at one of the free-roam rooms. "What kind of hours are you available to work?"

Carolina came to rest—parade rest, almost—behind Wash, glancing briefly to the cats before looking Kimball straight in the eye. "We have flexible schedules. Five or six hours a week."

"That's great," Kimball said.

"We travel sometimes," Wash said, tapping on a window to get Bob The Cat's attention. "Might have to be on pretty short notice. I hope that's okay."

"Sure," Kimball said. "Whatever you can give us. In case you hadn't noticed, we're sort of floundering to keep afloat. Any little bit helps. C'mere, let me get you guys some nametags."

Carolina followed on her heels to the kitchen, Wash lagging behind a little and jogging to keep up. "So," Kimball said. "Either of you have any pets at home?"

"No," Carolina said. Her eyes twitched down, and for a moment she relaxed enough to let through a faintly self-deprecating smile. "I'm not very good with them. This is all new to me."

"That's fine," Kimball said, handing them each a sticker and a sharpie to write their names. "A shelter's actually a pretty great place to learn."

"I've got two," Wash said. "Cats."

"That's great," Kimball said.

Carolina turned to look at Wash, her expression unreadable, but there was definitely more than a little amusement in her voice. "You have cats? I... how?"

"Yeah," Wash said, defensively. "My neighbor takes care of them when I'm away."

"Since when do you have cats?"

"Since last year."

Carolina's brow furrowed for a moment, the smile leaving her face with unsettling abruptness. Wash looked down, his jaw clenching. It was such a ridiculously disproportionate response to a benign conversation that Kimball felt a flip-flop in her stomach, a strange, sinking feeling of something terribly not-right.

Carolina shook her head, breaking the odd moment, and stuck her nametag sticker onto her shirt. "We're good to start whenever."

Kimball stared at her, trying to recapture the strange sense of dread, but she was having trouble coming up with a reason for her bad feeling. Especially since Carolina had gamely drawn a little smiley-face next to her name. "Why don't you two go hang out in one of the free-roam rooms and get to know the cats a little? Wash, you can show Carolina how to brush knots out of a long-haired cat's fur. Princess Fluffypants is a real sweetie, good place to start. Brush is on a hook by the door. Just use hand sanitizer as you go from room to room."

"Princess Fluffypants," Carolina said, in a vaguely horrified sort of voice.

"Princess Fluffypants," Wash echoed, delighted.

"You'll do great," Kimball said. "I'll grab Jensen or Bitters and send them your way. Welcome aboard."

On the opposite end of the hallway, the door to the front desk swung open and Donut stuck his head in. "Hey, Kimball! Someone at the door!"

Kimball blinked, and left Wash and Carolina to the tender mercies of Her Imperial Highness of Fluffiness, jogging up to meet Donut. "What's up?"

He pointed. There was an older man standing at the front desk, both hands behind his back, staring at the clean-up proceedings with an air of faint amusement. He was unfamiliar, and therefore a potential adopter. Finally.

"Hello," she said, grinning big. "I'm sorry about the mess, it's been one of those days. Welcome to Purrfect Harmony! Are you looking to adopt, or just visiting?"

The man smiled. "Neither," he said. "I'm here to make you an offer."

Kimball's smile faltered. "An offer?"

"I understand your organization is in fairly dire financial straits," said the man. "I propose that your present business model is not sustainable. I own a great deal of property in the area, and I'd like to purchase this facility and the surrounding land." He extended a hand, smiling. "My name is Malcolm Hargrove. I hope we can do business."