Paige had written:
He usually waits for Jason around 6 p.m.
After that Rebecca began noticing the pattern differently.
At 5:55, Rusty often stood.
Around six, he positioned himself where he could see the front entrance.
Sometimes a male volunteer came through and Rusty's tail moved before he had clearly seen who it was.
Then the man passed.
Rusty returned to his bed.
Nobody at the rescue claimed the dog understood incarceration.
That would have been impossible to know.
Dogs understand routines, smells, voices, places, departures, and returns in ways humans can observe, but assigning human explanations to what they think about prolonged absence goes beyond what anyone could prove.
What Rebecca could say was simpler.
Rusty expected something at six o'clock.
And whatever he expected was not arriving.
Inside the jail, Jason knew only pieces of this.
Paige told him Rusty was eating.
That mattered.
She told him his medication had gone with him.
That mattered too.
Then, during a call several weeks later, she mentioned that the rescue had located a foster couple willing to take Rusty for a longer period.
They lived outside Mansfield.
A little more than two hours away.
Jason stopped her.
“When?”
“Probably next Thursday.”
Jason looked automatically at the wall calendar visible beyond the phone area.
His release date was still several weeks away.
“So he'll be gone.”
“For now.”
“I mean before I get out.”
Paige understood.
“Probably.”
Jason's first instinct was to ask her to stop the move.
He did not.
A dog needed a stable place more than Jason needed reassurance.
The couple had a fenced yard, no young children, and experience with senior dogs. From everything Paige had been told, it was a good placement.
Jason knew that.
He also knew that two hours could become permanent surprisingly fast when life was unstable.
That night he lay awake longer than usual.
The last time Rusty had seen him, Jason had been standing beside the apartment door with his jacket on.
The dog had expected him to return.
Jason had expected to return too.
Neither of them had understood that the ordinary evening routine they had repeated for nearly ten years was about to stop.
The next morning Jason asked a corrections officer for a request form.
He wrote slowly.
There were things he could have requested.