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But he doesn’t say yes. Instead, he says, “Four weeks.”

I sneer. “Four weeks? Every day? Um, no. I think there might be child labor laws—”

“Not every day.” He considers. “Four days a week.”

“Two.”

“That’s only eight days, which is only one day more than your original offer.”

I shrug.

“Four days a week,” he repeats. “That’s how much Morgan worked. Hopefully by the end of your sentence, she’ll be back.”

I twist my lips to the side. Four weeks. With Quint.

It sounds dreadful. But I have to keep my eyes on the prize.

“And in return?” I ask.

Quint sighs. “We can redo the stupid project.”

A smile spreads across my lips and I’m two seconds away from an actual squeal when he takes one giant step toward me and lifts a finger between us. “But this time, we are going to actually work together.”

Oh,please,I want to say. He’s going to lecture me on teamwork? The guy who couldn’t be bothered to show up half the time?

But I’m so close, so I decide it’s best not to bring this up. We’ll see how involved he really intends to be once we get started. All I need is for him to sign off on the final product, but now is not the time to discuss details.

“All right,” I say, clapping my hands together. “Train away. Let’s do this.”

He looks at me for what feels like ages, before something shifts in his expression. His lips quirk, just a little. His eyes darken into something that seems almost cruel.

He gestures for me to follow him. “Come on, then. We’d better get you an apron.”

FIFTEEN

Food prep. Quint tells me we’ll be starting with food prep.

I want to believe that means we’ll be making cheese sandwiches for the staff, but something tells me I won’t be that lucky. We make our way down the long corridor and pass another half-dozen workers in matching yellow shirts. I was beginning to think it was just me, Quint, Rosa, and Shauna. Oh, and that Opal person that was mentioned, who I think might be the vet. I wonder if the other people here are volunteers or paid staff. They seem busy, whatever they are, tending to the animals inside the little cubicles that reminded me of horse stalls. A few of them give smiles and nods to Quint, and curious glances to me, but for the most part they’re focused on their tasks.

I take in as much of the center as I can, trying to figure out what might be useful, but this is about as far from a tourist destination as I can imagine. Some of the walls have shower heads, and all the floors have drains. Some even have tiny plastic kiddie pools. There are crates full of blankets and towels scattered throughout the hall, and metal carts loaded with cleaning supplies and scissors and boxes of latex gloves and plastic tubes and measuring cups and harnesses and a whole lot of tools and bizarre medical equipment.

The wall beside each enclosure has a piece of paper tucked into a plastic sleeve with the name of the animal inside, along with notes on their care. I try to read a couple, seeing things like feeding schedule and medications listed there, but Quint whisks me quickly to the end of the hallway.

We turn into a small room, not much bigger than a closet, with three large utility sinks. Quint grabs a canvas apron off a peg on the wall and hands it to me. I slip it over my neck and tie the cord around my waist. The heavy-duty material is covered in brownish-rust-toned stains that I donotwant to think about.

Then Quint opens a giant refrigerator and the reek of fish increases tenfold.

I stumble back, my stomach heaving. I’m staring at buckets of dead fish, their black eyes dull and bulging.

I clamp a hand over my mouth and nose. “Oh, gross.”

“Having second thoughts?” Quint says, pulling on a pair of latex gloves. Without waiting for a response, he grabs a bucket and thumps it on a nearby counter. “So, a lot of the animals that end up here haven’t learned to feed themselves.”

“Seems like a flaw of evolution,” I mutter, thinking back to ninth-grade science and all that talk ofsurvival of the fittest.I don’t say it out loud, and I don’t think Quint picks up on my subtext.Let the smart ones that figured out how to devour fish the right way live, and the rest can become shark food. Circle of life, right?

He grabs a stainless-steel bowl and sets it on an electric scale beside the bucket. “Well, sometimes it’s because they got separated from their mom too early, before she could teach them to properly hunt for themselves.”

I bite my tongue, hating that he had a perfectly reasonable and depressing explanation.