🐾 PART 9 — The Things You Carry
Summer passed in soft, slow days.
Emma watered the grass over Shadow’s grave every morning before breakfast. She placed wildflowers there—sometimes daisies, sometimes weeds that looked like stars. Her mother once offered to buy roses, but Emma shook her head.
“Shadow didn’t care about pretty things,” she said. “Just real ones.”
They never argued with her about that.
Her world had changed again.
Not shattered like before—but shifted.
The house still echoed with absences: the patter of paws, the thump against the cabinet, the soft sighs in the dark. Sometimes she thought she heard him—at the door, or under the table.
But it was memory playing tricks.
And that was okay.
Because some things stay even when they’re gone.
Her father started sitting on the porch with her after dinner.
They didn’t talk much at first. But one evening, he cleared his throat and said, “I didn’t know how to be a dad.”
Emma looked at him.
“I didn’t know how to be a daughter either,” she said quietly.
They sat in silence, two shadows side by side, watching the sky change color.
That was the night he gave her the box.
A simple wooden thing with a latch.
Inside were pieces of Shadow: his collar. His leash. A photo they’d taken on Family Pet Day, printed and framed. And at the bottom, her father had tucked a folded sheet of notebook paper.
In his awkward handwriting, it read:
He was braver than I’ve ever been. But I’m trying. For you.
Emma didn’t cry until later. Not because it was sad.
But because it meant something had healed.
The school year started with a new teacher and a fresh notebook.
On the first day of class, they were told to write about “someone who taught you a life lesson.”
Emma raised her hand.
“Can it be… someone who isn’t alive?”
Mrs. Bell smiled. “Of course.”
So Emma wrote about a dog who found her when she was lost.
About how he didn’t need words to love her.
About how he never asked her to be different, only to be there.
About how, even now, she sometimes reached for him in the dark.
When she read it aloud, the room went quiet.
One girl cried.
Another clapped.
And for the first time ever, Emma didn’t shrink from their eyes.
She stood tall.
Because Shadow had stood for her first.
That afternoon, she walked home alone.
Not afraid.
She passed the schoolyard fence. The empty lot. The place where the old oak once stood.
It had fallen during a storm in July.
Now it lay twisted in the grass, its bark peeled and gray.
Emma knelt beside it, brushing her hand across the stump.
“I’m still here,” she whispered. “Because you stayed.”
And the wind moved through the leaves like a yes.