When Jamie walks through the door of the Humane Society, it's not just an animal who needs rescuing that day. Tom is there to adopt another service dog into the Canine Comrade Corps, but it's Jamie his heart goes out to. But each man turns away, walks away, from the potential pain, the rejection, the knowledge that it'll all end in tears....

Jamie knows damn well that the HIV he contracted from an unfaithful lover has put him out of the dating game forever in the small town of Santa Vera. Tom lost his legs in Afghanistan, and got new ones, yeah, but with a side order of PTSD to go, he thought grimly. The real problem is that only now does he realize he's gay, now that the revelation would be just one too many things to put his family through, after everything else they've had to deal with.

So both men grin and bear the loneliness, put their feelings on a shelf, even as Jamie's volunteer stint at CCC turns into friendship and, despite their resolve, something more....

Tom saw Jamie's smile. He's totally relaxed about this. You're getting there. This is going to work out, this is going to be a friendship. I need this. To be with normals again, people who aren't....

Well, the fact was that Jamie wasn't normal, was he? The fact that he had been through what he'd been through, in Tom's mind put him on Tom's side of the world, on the island of broken toys. Someone who could understand, who wasn't one of them, the ones living a life oblivious to suffering, illness, pain.

It's too bad, Jamie thought calmly. If only I didn't have the bug, I could do this, I could...well, at least fantasize realistically about this becoming something. People liked it when you were just a little broken, he knew from experience.