Part 8 — “The Book That Walked”
The first time Penny held a printed copy of The Loop Book in her hands, she didn’t say anything.
She just ran her fingers across the cover, where her title sat in big black letters under a simple line drawing: a girl and a dog walking side by side, leaving a looping trail of paw prints and footprints behind them. No faces. Just outlines. Just movement.
Miss Jean had worked with the library’s small press to print twenty-five copies. Not stapled this time. Real books. With pages that smelled like promise.
“We’re calling this the first edition,” Miss Jean had said, beaming. “I’ve already got kids asking when you’ll come back to read more.”
Penny smiled, but it came slow. It had only been two weeks since Chance’s last walk.
She still reached for him sometimes.
Still woke in the night expecting the click of his nails on the hardwood.
But now she reached for something else, too.
Her notebook. Her words. Her story.
The loop hadn’t ended.
It had simply changed form.
The first time she read The Loop Book without him beside her, Penny sat in the middle of the children’s section of the library, surrounded by kids who sat so still it felt like they knew the moment was bigger than the room.
Some of them had canes. Some had service dogs. One had a little brother who sat beside him in silence, clutching a stuffed labrador.
When Penny reached the line that read:
“Sometimes healing doesn’t look like a miracle. Sometimes it looks like a mutt.”
—one girl quietly wiped her eyes with the cuff of her sweatshirt.
Another whispered, “My dog helped me after my surgery.”
Penny looked up, heart full and aching.
“Mine helped me remember who I was,” she said.
A local newspaper got wind of her reading and ran a story titled:
“Girl and Dog Walk Their Way Into Local Hearts.”
It went viral.
Not internet-viral. But real-viral, like phone calls from cousins she hadn’t seen in years. Like envelopes arriving from out of state with kind words and photographs of dogs and children and walkers and wheelchairs.
One letter came from a woman in Ohio whose husband had lost mobility after a stroke.
“Your story made us cry. We showed it to his physical therapist. Now they’re talking about therapy dogs. Thank you for giving us a new way to begin.”
Another letter came from a boy in Vermont who’d been too scared to leave the house since his dog died.
“I didn’t think anyone else felt like that. I’m going to write my own book now. Maybe it’ll help someone too.”
Penny kept every letter in a shoebox beneath her bed.
She called it The Loop Lives On.
That spring, the library launched a monthly event: “Loops of Love: Storytime With Therapy Dogs.”
Penny was the first guest.
But not the last.
Children came with dogs. With stories. With drawings and journals and quiet truths.
One boy brought a mutt missing half an ear.
Another girl read from a book about the dog that stayed with her through chemotherapy.
Penny sat in the back and watched them all.
Watched the way the dogs laid their heads on laps, the way the kids straightened when they read, even when their voices trembled.
Jada came to the second event and leaned over to whisper, “Look what you started.”
Penny shook her head gently.
“No,” she said. “Look what he started.”
One night in May, Penny sat alone by the window where it had all begun
Outside, the block was quiet.
The elm tree rustled in the breeze, its new leaves whispering secrets to the air.
She thought of Chance—how he used to pause here, always at the same spot, like memory had roots.
She closed her eyes.
And for a moment, she heard him.
The click of paws.
The turn of his head.
The soft, huffing breath that said: You’re not alone.
She opened her eyes.
The street was empty.
But she smiled anyway.
Because it wasn’t.
Not really.
That night, she opened her second notebook.
On the first page, she wrote:
Book Two: The Dog Who Walks in My Bones.
Then, in smaller letters beneath:
Because some loops never really close. They just change shape.