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I missed David so much and that hadn’t changed since the night a year and a half ago, when a crackhead shot him in a lonely parking lot in Boulder.

David and I had been inseparable before his death. We skied all over Colorado and the rest of the West. Spent Sundays at a health clinic for migrants in Pueblo. Read so many books that both our small houses could have doubled as lending libraries. We had more friends than we knew what to do with sometimes. We loved and lived a full life just about every minute of the day.

I had a thriving big- and small-animal practice. Early each morning, I went off to farms and ranches where I took care of horses and other large animals. People from all over the county brought their smaller pets to me at the Inn-Patient. For what it was worth, I was named “Veterinarian for the ’90s” by the Denver Post.

Now, everything was changed, the arc of my life was dipping in the wrong direction, and it didn’t seem reversible. I thought about David’s murder all the time. I bothered the police in Boulder until they asked me to stay away. I rarely went on house calls anymore, although cases still came to me.

I flung myself out of bed. I threw on my old faithful blue plaid robe and stuck my feet into slippers I’d been given for Christmas by a couple of cute kids whose coyote-mauled puppy I’d stitched up.

The slippers were made to look like cocker spaniel heads. Dopey eyes staring up, pink tongues lolling, floppy ears, the works.

I turned on the tape deck—Fiona Apple’s unmistakable, throaty moan; eighteen years old and full of piss and vinegar and creative craziness. I liked that in a diva.

I opened the door from the “master suite” and entered the lab. I was greeted by my favorite poster for this month:Fox hunting is the unspeakable in full pursuit of the uneatable—Oscar Wilde.

First things first, I filled the coffeepot with hazelnut vanilla. Once the java started to perk, I began to look in on my patients.

Frannie O’Neill, this is your life.

Ward One was a twelve-by-twelve room with a sink, a single window, two tiers of neat, clean cages. The bottom tier held three boarders: two dogs and the roommate of one of them, a common leghorn chicken.

One of the dogs, a standard poodle, had ripped his catheter out again, despite the e-collar I had on him. I chewed him out in all of the sixteen words I know in French so he’d understand me. Then I reinserted the tube in place. I ruffled his topknot and forgave him. “Je t’aime,” I said.

Ward Two is a slightly smaller replica of Ward One, but without any windows on the world. Some of my “exotics” were caged in this room: a bunny with pneumonia, not going to make it; a hamster that I received by way of UPS with no accompanying note.

And there was a swan named Frank that my sister, Carole, rescued from a pond out by the racetrack. Carole thinks she’s St. Theresa of the wilds. At the moment, my sister was off camping in one of the state parks with her daughters. I almost went with her.

My coffee was ready. I poured myself a steaming cup, added whole milk and sugar. Mmm, mmm good.

Pip was at my heels. Pip’s a Jack Russell terrier, a funny little boy who’d been turned in as a stray but had probably been abandoned. He did a little up-on-hind-legs dance that he knows I like. I kissed him, poured out a bowl of kibble, added in the last of some Rice Chex.

“You like?”

“Wuff.”

“Glad to hear it.”

I strolled back out to the front of the house. That’s when I saw the triple-black, macho Jeep. L. L. Bean man. Kit Whatever. The hunter was back in my yard again. He was standing beside the Jeep, rifle slung over his shoulder.

Then I got a glimpse of a slack form lying over the hood.

Oh, God, no! He’s already shot something! He’s murdered an animal on my land. That bastard! That shit!

I had seen plenty of carcasses and dead animals up in these woods, but this was my land, my private property, and I thought of it as a sanctuary away from the world’s madness.

“Hey, you,” I shouted. “Hey.