EPISODE 4 — The Forge
He buried Buddy by the lake with his own hands. Dug through frozen ground for three hours. Didn’t tell his father. Didn’t tell anyone.
His mother found the empty dog bed a week later. She didn’t ask. She just held him while he shook, and that was worse than anything.
The guilt moved in like a tenant that never pays rent and never leaves.
It told Tommy: you killed him. It told him: two beers. It told him: if you’d left ten minutes earlier, ten minutes later, if you’d stayed home—
He tried drowning it. Didn’t work — he could swim.
He tried outrunning it. Bought the Harley at twenty-one with lumber yard money. The speed helped for exactly as long as the ride lasted. Then the engine stopped, and the quiet came back, and Buddy was there in the quiet.
So he got bigger. Louder. Meaner. Grew the beard, got the ink, joined the club. Built a wall of noise around the hole in his chest so high and thick that nobody would ever see through it.
It worked. Nobody saw through it.
Nobody, that is, until a sixty-eight-year-old sergeant in a roadside diner took one look at him and said: “You lost a dog, and it wasn’t your fault.”
Twenty years. Twenty years of noise. And five words from an old man with a gray-muzzled Malinois cracked the wall like it was made of paper.
