My daughter’s friends appeared at my door with their wish; what they showed me revealed the heart I had been hiding.

During all that time, I believed that those children were taking me away from my daughter.

Actually, they had been helping her heal me.

Then the youngest girl burst into even louder tears.

“The day of the accident,” she whispered, “we were coming back from looking for him.”

“There was a golden dog near the road,” another boy explained quietly. We now know it wasn’t Benji, but from a distance it looked pretty close.

The blonde girl wiped away her tears.

Angie saw him and shouted, “It’s him!” Then she ran straight into the intersection…

He couldn’t finish the sentence.

The boy with glasses spoke in a low voice.

Before she died, she took my hand and told us that if we truly loved her, we had to keep looking for Benji… for you.

I buried my face in Benji’s fur and cried more than at the funeral.

“I told everyone to stay away,” I whispered.

The dark-haired boy nodded once.

“Yeah”.

“And yet they came.”

He looked at me with eyes that suddenly seemed much more mature than they were.

“Angie was our friend.”

At that moment, my anger finally faded away.

Because even though I blamed them for my pain, they too had borne their own burden.

Benji came into our lives when Angie was nine years old.

My husband Peter found him at a roadside adoption event. He came back to the car with a golden floppy-eared puppy in his arms while Angie screamed so loudly that people turned around laughing.

“We’re just watching,” I told him.

Peter smiled and gave Angie the leash.

“We already looked for her.”

Two months later, Peter died in a motorcycle accident.

After that, it was just the three of us left.

Benji was sleeping next to Angie’s bedroom door.

Then next to mine.

As if she couldn’t decide which of the two needed more protection.

It was the last living link we had with the man we both loved.

Then, during our move eight months earlier, Benji disappeared.

We looked for him for days.

Without a collar or ID tag, he simply vanished.

And now, sitting on my living room floor with him in my arms, I finally understood something.

Those boys hadn’t stolen my daughter.

In her stubborn teenage way, Angie had been trying to give something back to me.

PART 3

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