"Jacob? Jacob, who? Ain't no Jacob be livin' in this house. My baby boy died. He no longer here. He up and wasted all his education for some fool dream and look where it got him? The poor house and dead. That's what it got him. He don't live here no more. Stop calling--"

"Momma, please--"

"I said you stop calling here, y'hear me?"

And with those screeched words ringing in Jacob's ear, he hung up the phone with one of those story book perfect clicks. The sort of sounds authors wrote about when doors slammed, things broke and walls were built forever.

He stared down at his hands long and hard. Dark brown skin over big knuckles and well shaped hands stretched as he splayed them wide, turned them over to inspect pale palms. Momma always said he'd make a fine doctor someday, and she was right.

She was a stubborn woman. She'd change her number again.

Jacob curled his fingers back into loose fists and realized that at the age of thirty-three, he'd dedicated his entire life to a woman who could never be pleased and animals. As fulfilling as the latter rarely could be, he realized it was time to start living before there wasn't any living left in him.

Distant friends called his second move a mid-life crises, others called it the motions of a naive fool.

Jacob called it an adventure and was learning to embrace it with both hands wide open. It was just a matter of getting over how bitter and jaded he'd become.

"He is a strange man. Perhaps an angry man. No, I have never seen him get angry, but there is just...I do not know. It is difficult to say." The girl named Stormraven k'Leshya shrugged, and smiled, and tilted her head to one side, in that birdlike fashion she had.

"He is a doctor-of-animals, a healer. They call them vets here? Veterinarians, as opposed to veterans. And in that, for all his irritation with their sentient owners? There is no fault in him--the animals? He cares for them. I would take my cats to no other man."

"How do I know him, you ask? I volunteer at an animal shelter, and he often volunteers his own time there. I do not see him that often, but I am always glad when I do. For whatever other faults you may perceive in him, I know Jacob Arche is a good man."

(And for the record, the player thinks Jacob is delightful too. But Stormy wanted to have her say!)