My father didn’t leave a will. He left a h0stage situation. The h0stage was me. The captor was a seventy-five-pound rescue mutt named Barnaby, who smelled like wet wool and judged me with eyes the color of burnt amber

My father didn’t leave a will. He left a hostage situation. The hostage was me. The captor was a seventy-five-pound rescue mutt named Barnaby, who smelled like wet wool and judged me with eyes the color of burnt amber.

I was standing in the garage of a small, rusted-out town in Ohio. I was thirty-two years old, a Senior AI …