Rex’s behavior was baffling. He’d looked it up—why a dog might fixate on a particular person, and found the usual answers: attachment, scent, routine. German Shepherds were known for bonding intensely and for their sensitivity to human stress. Perhaps Rex could sense that Zoe was anxious. That was plausible.
But what didn’t fit the explanation was the specificity of it. Rex wasn’t comforting her in the way an anxious dog sought comfort. He was attentive in the way a working dog was attentive—alert, watchful, locked in.
One evening George sat on the kitchen floor beside him and said, half-joking, “What do you know that I don’t?” Rex turned and looked at him with the dark, patient expression of a creature that knew the answer and had no way to convey it. George had laughed. Then he’d felt, without quite knowing why, the particular loneliness of being the least informed person in a room.