Last night I was curled up by the fire, reading a book I'd found through another author. I'd fallen into the setting, a mysterious antique shop, the kind of place you can smell, when a terrier named Jake trotted onto the page. I sat up.

A flashback hit me with the force of a speeding bus. As if a veil lifted. The same house. The familiar sounds. The distinct scents. Coming home after a day's work, honest or otherwise, to dogs who'd sprint up the driveway, tails going, to escort me to my own front door like I was someone worth escorting. What a feeling. Something a cat would never do, not even one bribed with tuna. I won't dwell here long, because the yaps and whimpers and yips of those dogs still echo, and some echoes you have to be careful with.

Lovey came to me sideways, the way the best things do. Back then I ran my own IT business, mostly house calls for wealthy people who'd bought expensive Apple machines they had no idea how to use, far as I could tell, mainly for sitting in coffee shops looking at photographs. Lovey belonged to one of those clients. A Jack Russell. Every time I came to service her master's computer, she'd bark and wriggle and perform her silly tricks just for me.

Then one day, the phone rang. We're taking Lovey to the SPCA, unless you want her. We know she really likes you.

"Hell yeah," I said. "Bring her on."

I drove to the next town and collected my dog, her bed, her toys, her basket, her bowls, everything. Everything except her master. She came home to love, space, a swimming pool to tear around while we melted in the sun, and a whole life that was finally hers.

Then came Elfie. A pavement special who looked like she had Weimaraner somewhere in her, rescued by my wife on the drive home from work. "I just had to," she said, with the smile that dares you to argue. "Now Lovey has a friend." And that was that, a point of no return. Lovey didn't mind sharing her small bed with her new sister. The afternoon walks got easier too, the two of them moving like they'd always known each other.

Then winter came. A hard, unyielding winter, the fourth in a row without rain.

Drought.

Businesses closed. People lost work, sold what they owned to get through. The wealthy clung to their luxuries. And it became my turn to close the doors, on the business, the two cars, the house. No one could take Lovey or Elfie. And because we'd volunteered at the SPCA, we knew exactly where the road ended, and we knew what it meant.

I have never sobbed the way I sobbed that day. Carrying your dog from the car into the care centre is a thing I cannot explain to anyone who hasn't done it, and would never wish on anyone who has. My heart still aches writing this. The tears are on my face right now, my throat tight. For weeks afterward the joy just went out of me. I couldn't eat or sleep. I lost so much weight I felt like I was drifting out of my own life into some other one.

You don't replace a dog that's gone. If you've felt it, you already know. If you haven't, no sentence I write will get you there.

So I found another way to carry them.

I built dogs. Dogs like Lovey, like Elfie, and I put them into my stories where nothing could take them away again. Here's a thing I believe: darkness can't survive the faintest glimmer of light. Anyone who knows my gothic fiction, and knows Coby McTavish, my protagonist, who loves dogs the way I do, understands why those animals are in there. In my first novel it was Pippa, helping unravel the haunted heart of the manor. And then the letters started coming. Real readers, real people, sending me photographs of their own dogs, adopted, rescued, bought for next to nothing. Because a dog lights up a story the same way it lights up a house. You either know that in your bones or you don't.

I'll be fair, there are other kinds of beings, animal and human both. Cat people, or perhaps I should say cat worshippers. I sat with that idea a long time before I found the right place for them: the dim corridors of Serpent's Manor, my second most popular tale. There I introduced Shadowmere, a raven-furred cat with luminous amber eyes. And the cat lovers wrote to me exactly the way the dog lovers had. Fair is fair.

It was only last night, reading about Jake by that fire, that the whole thing connected. Jake carried something of Lovey and Elfie in him, and it pulled me upright, leaning into the page, breath caught. I read the reviews while drafting my own, and I noticed how often other readers mentioned the dog, how it helped them through their own grief.

Just yesterday I told Captain, my writing confidant, the plain truth: I've never chased money. The books cover what they need to cover. What I'm really after is to give a reader something that stays, an escape from a hard day, a hard year, or the memory of a pet they had to let go.

And reading by the fire last night, I finally understood something about myself I'd never looked at directly.

Maybe I do all of this to buy more time with Benji.

Our cherished Jack Russell. So that whatever days he has left are full of comfort and good treats and the sound of me working beside him.

P.S. — To everyone following Benji's journey. His cancer and kidney disease are advancing daily. The vet first gave him a month. He's given us two. I think it's because he lies at my feet while I write, certain he still has more to say.

Stay strong, Benji. Please. Your character will appear in the final instalment of The McTavish Chronicles, and your legacy will outlast us both.

In loving memory of Lovey and Elfie. I miss you with tears in my eyes.

— Iwan, your temporary confidant.