The door hadn’t creaked in months. Ivy curled around the hinges like a warning: Do not disturb. Inside, the house had grown wild—part jungle, part shipwreck, part laboratory—cluttered with books, bones, feathers, and strange ticking machines. Somewhere, under a pile of blueprints and banana peels, was a man.

Dr. John Dolittle.

Once, he had been a legend. The doctor who could speak to animals. The man who rode camels through deserts and whales across oceans. The man who laughed louder than lions and argued with parrots like old married couples. But that was before Lily.

Since her death, he’d become something else—half man, half myth, mostly recluse. He wore a moth-eaten coat and spoke in squawks and growls more than words. His beard was more nest than hair. When he did speak English, it sounded foreign, as if he hadn’t used it in years. The animals understood him, though. They always had.

Polynesia, the parrot, perched on his shoulder like a conscience. “You’re sulking again,” she squawked, watching him dig through a box of seashells with too much care for a man who claimed not to care.

“I’m organizing,” he muttered.

“You’re hiding.”

He didn’t answer.

Dolittle wasn’t cruel—just tired. Tired of goodbyes, of expectations, of being needed. He much preferred a sick lion to a healthy politician. Animals were honest. People lied. Then a knock on the door sounded.