I stared at them. They had been doing all of that while I sat home thinking my daughter was being pulled away from me by bad company.
Then the smallest girl looked down at Benji and started crying harder. "The day it happened," she said, "we were coming back from one of those searches."
"There was a golden dog near the road," the dark-haired boy said. "Not him, we know that now, but from where we were, it looked close enough. Angie just took off on her bike."
"She didn't even slow down," the blond girl whispered.
I closed my eyes. I could see it without wanting to. My daughter leaning over the handlebars, her mind already ahead of her body, believing for one reckless second that life was finally giving something back.
I sat home thinking my daughter was being pulled away from me by bad company.
The smallest girl said, "She pointed and cried, 'It's him,' and then a truck came through the intersection and..." She couldn't finish.
The boy with the glasses spoke last. "On that road, before she was gone, she grabbed my hand and said if we loved her at all, we had to keep looking for Benji... for you."
I felt my grip tighten on Benji's fur. "I told you all to stay away."
The dark-haired boy nodded once. "Yeah."
"And you still did this."
He looked at me with a face far older than his age. "Angie was our friend."
"I told you all to stay away."
It broke my heart. I had blamed them because I needed somewhere to put the pain. Meanwhile, these children had been carrying Angie too, just in a quieter way.
That was the moment the anger finally gave way, and all at once my mind went back to the one other loss that had once left my daughter just as heartbroken.
Benji had come home to us when Angie was nine.
My husband, Peter, found him at a roadside adoption event and came back to the car holding a floppy-eared golden puppy while Angie screamed so loud people turned to laugh.
"We're just looking," I had said.
My husband smiled and handed her the leash. "We already looked."
My mind went back to the one other loss that had once left my daughter just as heartbroken.
Two months later, Peter was gone in a motorbike crash.
After that, it was just the three of us. Benji slept outside Angie's door, then outside mine, as if he couldn't decide which one of us needed guarding more. He was the last living thing in our home that had belonged to the man we loved.
On moving day eight months ago, Benji vanished. We searched every street and called his name until Angie fell asleep in the passenger seat with dried tears on her face. Without his collar, without anything to mark him as ours, Benji was simply gone.
Now I held him again and finally understood: it wasn't those kids pulling Angie away from me. The girl I thought I was losing had, in her own stubborn teenage way, been trying to give me something back.
The blond girl sat beside me. "We found him at a shelter in your old town this morning. Someone had found him in the woods two days ago and brought him there, and the cleft in his ear was what made us sure it was really him."
Benji was simply gone.
I laughed through tears. "I used to say he looked like he'd been born mid-argument."
Angie used to laugh at that. The memory hit so hard that I had to stop speaking.
"Why didn't she tell me?" I finally asked.
"Because she wanted it to be a surprise," the dark-haired boy said.
"And because she was scared of failing," the blond girl added.
