🐾 PART 6 — “The Ones Who Stayed”
Rockport, Missouri | One Week Later
The memoir was no longer just a tribute.
It was becoming a bridge — not only between past and present, but between people who thought they were forgotten. Frank hadn’t expected that. He thought he was writing for himself. For Axel. Maybe for Matt.
But the letters kept coming.
Folded into his mailbox. Left under his windshield wiper at the grocery store. One slipped beneath the door at the diner where he still nursed a single cup of coffee like it was sacred.
“I was the dispatcher that night. I remember the way your voice cracked when you said, ‘Dog’s with the kid. He’s safe.’ I cried in my car after my shift.”
“Axel came to my elementary school in 2006. I was scared of dogs until I met him. He licked my hand. I never forgot that.”
“I was a rookie when he died. I didn’t know him well, but I remember the funeral. I remember thinking… if I could be loved the way that dog was, I’d done something right.”
Frank collected them in a shoebox marked simply: The Ones Who Stayed.
He shared them with Matt over coffee.
The young man read each one like it was a sacred text. His fingers trembled as he unfolded the dispatcher’s note. His eyes welled up reading the child’s memory of Axel licking his hand.
“I didn’t think he touched that many lives,” Matt said softly.
Frank shook his head. “You never do. Not until someone finally says it out loud.”
Matt had adopted a dog.
He brought him to Frank’s place one afternoon. A rescue mutt — half shepherd, half something scruffy. Young, cautious, with big paws and hesitant eyes.
“He’s got Axel’s tail,” Frank noted, watching it wag like a metronome that hadn’t yet learned rhythm.
“Still figuring things out,” Matt said. “Like me.”
“What’s his name?”
Matt hesitated.
“Gus. Short for August. I met him the same week we started writing.”
Frank nodded approvingly.
Gus sniffed at Axel’s leash, then lay down beside it like he already understood.
Frank was writing every day now.
He no longer needed to look for inspiration — it showed up in Matt’s voice, in the letters, in the way Gus tilted his head at the word “stay.”
But the memories weren’t always kind.
One morning, while drafting the chapter titled The Last Call, Frank froze at his keyboard. His breathing shallowed. His hands wouldn’t stop shaking.
Because he remembered the sound.
The echo of a gunshot in that warehouse.
The way Axel yelped, then went silent.
The sprint across broken glass. The blood.
The way he looked up at Frank — not in pain, not in fear — but with calm eyes, like he knew this was the end and he didn’t want Frank to feel guilty.
Frank never told anyone that part.
Never wrote it down.
Until now.
He called Matt that night.
“I don’t think I can finish this chapter,” he said.
Matt didn’t hesitate.
“Then don’t finish it alone.”
They met the next day at the cemetery.
Axel was buried under the big oak tree, the only dog in that section of the grounds — a courtesy extended by the department, paid for by fellow officers. His grave had a small plaque that read:
“K9 Axel – Loyal Until the End.”
Someone had left a fresh rose.
Frank didn’t ask who.
They sat by the grave as the wind stirred the grass.
Frank opened his notebook.
“I never told anyone what he looked like at the end.”
Matt nodded. “You don’t have to.”
“I do,” Frank said quietly. “Because no one ever writes about the part where they’re still there, even in pain. He didn’t whimper. He didn’t pull away. He looked at me like… like he was glad it was him and not me.”
His voice cracked. “I’ve never forgiven myself.”
Matt placed a hand on his arm.
“You don’t have to.”
Frank wiped his eyes, then looked at the page again.
He wrote:
He didn’t run. He stayed. Even in pain. That was Axel. He stayed.
Matt read the entry out loud when Frank finished.
There was no silence afterward.
Just the rustle of leaves, and Gus lying quietly at Axel’s grave like he knew.
That evening, Frank placed a new item on the mantle.
A second photo — this one of Matt, Gus, and the plaque.
He stared at it for a long time.
Then, quietly, he whispered, “Still here.”
The next day brought another letter.
No return address.
Just a wax seal.
Inside:
“I used to think bravery looked like running into fire.”
“Now I know it sometimes looks like staying beside someone in the dark.”
“Thank you.”
Frank added it to the shoebox.
The Ones Who Stayed.
Then opened a new document:
Chapter Seven: The Ones Who Stayed.
Because it wasn’t just about Axel anymore.
It never had been.
It was about every person, every dog, every soul who made the decision not to leave — even when it would’ve been easier to walk away.