Part 5 — “The Loop Book”
Penny wrote like the words had been waiting in her chest the whole time.
Not in perfect sentences. Not with fancy vocabulary. Just truth. Line after line of it, scrawled in that red spiral notebook with its bent wire and cookie crumbs wedged in the spine.
She titled the first page in shaky block letters:
“THE DOG WHO DIDN’T NEED BOTH EYES TO SEE ME.”
And beneath it:
His name is Chance.
He limps.
He walks in circles, like he’s remembering someone.
I used to be too tired to move, but he moved anyway.
And then one day, I followed him. And we both got found.
Penny showed the notebook to her physical therapist first. Jada read it cover to cover in one visit, her thumb tucked into the middle like she didn’t want to lose her place in the story.
“This,” she said, eyes misty, “isn’t just therapy. It’s testimony.”
Penny tilted her head. “What’s that mean?”
“It means what you’ve been through—what you and Chance made it through—deserves to be shared.”
By the end of that week, The Loop Book had a dozen new pages.
Penny added hand-drawn maps of the old walking path. She taped in a picture Melinda had taken the day Chance led the neighbors to her. She wrote one sentence in red ink and underlined it three times:
Sometimes healing doesn’t look like a miracle. Sometimes it looks like a mutt.
Her mom read it one evening on the couch and had to set it down halfway through.
“I didn’t know you felt this much,” she whispered, brushing hair from Penny’s eyes.
“I didn’t know I could,” Penny replied.
And it was true.
Words were easier now than walking. But walking came easier, too, when Chance rose with her. Stood beside her. Waited for her body to remember.
Jada emailed a connection she had at the local library—Reading Pals, a community program for kids with therapy animals.
The director, a woman named Miss Jean, asked if Penny might want to read her story aloud.
To other kids.
Penny hesitated.
“I don’t like crowds.”
“You’d just be reading,” her mom said gently. “And I’ll be there. And Chance.”
She looked down at the old dog, asleep beside her chair, snoring through his soft old nose.
“Only if he gets to come,” she said.
The library smelled like carpet and old pencils and the inside of used books. Penny liked it immediately.
Miss Jean greeted them at the front with a name tag that had stickers all over it and a pair of glasses perched halfway down her nose.
“You must be the girl with the famous dog,” she said.
Penny blushed. “He’s not famous.”
“Well,” Miss Jean said, “he’s already helped half the neighborhood, and now he’s here to help a room full of kids learn what healing really looks like. That sounds famous to me.”
They set up a circle of bean bags and folding chairs. A couple of second-graders sat cross-legged on the carpet. One little girl had a feeding tube under her shirt. Another wore noise-canceling headphones.
Chance walked the room slowly before curling beside Penny’s chair, his tail gently thumping each time she looked down at him.
She opened the notebook.
Read.
Her voice shook for the first few lines, but then the rhythm found her. The words lifted, softened, curled around the room like warm wind.
When she finished, there was a long silence.
Then a small hand shot up.
“Does Chance still go in circles?”
Penny smiled.
“Not anymore. Now he just goes where I go.”
Another voice—soft, uncertain. “Was it scary when you couldn’t walk?”
Penny nodded. “Yes. But not as scary as thinking I’d feel that way forever.”
“And now?”
She looked down at Chance.
“Now I know there’s always a way forward. Even if it’s slow.”
After the reading, Miss Jean pulled Penny aside.
“Would you mind if we made copies of The Loop Book? Just for the kids who want to keep it?”
Penny’s eyes widened. “You mean… like a real book?”
“Well, a stapled one,” Miss Jean chuckled. “But yes. Your words are helping people. That matters.”
Penny looked over her shoulder.
Chance was sniffing around the corner of the children’s desk, tail swaying gently like a metronome.
“He saved me,” she said.
Miss Jean followed her gaze. “And now you’re saving others.”
That night, back at home, Penny sat cross-legged on her bed.
Chance was curled against her knees, his breathing deep and slow.
She placed her hand on his ribs.
Felt the soft rise and fall.
“I think,” she whispered, “we’re part of each other’s loops now.”
He didn’t open his eye.
But he thumped his tail once.
And that was enough.