📖 Part 9: Letters to the Lost
Winter lingered long after the snow melted.
But something had changed inside the house on the edge of Ash Hollow.
The clinic lights came on each morning now. The shutters opened. The front step was swept clean. And every evening, Clara lit the porch light — not because she was waiting, but because someone else might be.
She buried Shadow’s second tag in a small tin box and placed it on the shelf beside Daniel’s photo. Right above it, she pinned a handwritten note on a yellowed index card:
“For those who stay, even after they’re gone.”
Visitors came in trickles — not many, just enough.
A cat with a torn ear. A puppy with mange. An old golden retriever whose legs gave out every few steps. And the children came too. They sat on the waiting room floor, reading picture books or holding their pets in trembling arms while Clara moved gently through the room.
One day, Simon came back.
The boy with the kitten.
He stood awkwardly at the door with a box of cookies and said, “My mom says thank you.”
Clara smiled.
The kitten — now healthy, playful — ran through her legs like it owned the place.
That night, Clara opened the old journal she and Daniel had once shared — a notebook filled with patient stories, sketches, and rough ideas. On the first blank page, she wrote:
“Shadow — December to January.”
Then below it:
“He didn’t save my life.
He just gave it back to me.”
She wrote more in the following weeks — memories of Shadow, of Daniel, of the dog she once lost and the one who found her again. The pages became soft at the edges. The ink smeared in places.
But it was the first thing she’d written in years.
When the journal was full, she placed it on the counter.
A young woman saw it one day and asked, “Is this real? The dog in the story?”
Clara just smiled.
“He was. He still is.”
A few days later, she painted a new sign above the clinic door.
It no longer read James Veterinary Care.
Now it said:
The James & Shadow Animal Haven
For the ones who return.
The red maple behind the house bloomed early that spring.
Its leaves turned a deep, brilliant red — as if remembering.
Clara often sat by its base with a cup of tea, the kitten curled at her feet.
And sometimes, just sometimes, she swore she heard the soft crunch of paws in the snow — even when there was none.