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sit anywhere you like. How about something to drink? Water or tea?”
    She shakes her head and drops onto the couch. Something in the middle of her face catches the overhead light and glitters—a tiny green nose piercing, I realize, a pinprick of color on her sallow face, like the distant beam of a lighthouse in a sea of fog. Underneath her hard expression, sadness looms, irrepressible.
    â€œMy dog is gone,” she says, staring at the floor. Her voice is flat, affectless.
    My heart contracts. It’s a knee-jerk reaction. All of my patients have lost their dogs; that’s why they come to me. Still, every time I hear the words, the hard thorn of loss draws blood.
    I sit down across the coffee table from her and tell her how sorry I am. She’s boring holes into the carpet with her eyes, so I direct my words to the milky, jagged line of skin exposed by the part in her hair. “Would you like to tell me about him?” I ask. “What kind of dog was he?”
    â€œNo.” Anya’s lips clip the word but she still doesn’t look up. She begins unzipping and zipping her jacket, the motion electric with a fierce sort of frustration.
    Already, I can see how a dog must have been good for someone with her uneven swings of energy, how the schedule and activity of the care and feeding and walking of a dog might have helped to balance her. Even petting a dog can lower your heart rate, producing endorphins that mirror the effects of antidepressants and pain medication. It’s just one of many reasons why some people take the death of a pet so hard. Another of my patients recently compared the experience to being cut off from Prozac.
    The word “no” still hangs in the air.
    â€œWe don’t have to talk about your dog,” I say. Some patients can’t contain their emotions—anger and anguish and even laughter bubble up and out of them as urgently as water gushing from a broken hydrant. Others need time, encouragement, or sometimes silence before they can begin. “We could start by talking about something else.”
    At this, she finally looks up. Her eyes are a murky shade of green, the color of plant life at the bottom of a lake. “No,” she says again. “Billy isn’t dead. He’s just . . . gone. I’m only here because my brother Henry blackmailed me into coming.”
    I glance down at the open notebook on my lap. At the top of the page I’d written Anya’s name. Below this I’d written: Brother — Henry . Now I add: Dog — Billy .
    I’ve never had a patient with a missing dog, let alone one who claimed to have been blackmailed into seeing me. The relationship between each patient and his or her dog is unique and the symptoms of grief vary, but the fact that the dog is dead has always been the same.
    â€œHow long has Billy been gone?” I ask.
    â€œTwenty-four days.”
    I write this down. “How awful. Can I ask what happened?”
    When Anya begins moving the zipper of her coat up and down again, I notice that the outline of an old-fashioned camera is tattooed on the top of her right hand. Inwardly, I wince; it strikes me as a particularly painful place to pierce repeatedly with a needle.
    â€œWhat good is talking about it going to do?” she asks. Her voice is losing its flat affect now, splintering into hard, jagged pieces. “I just want to find him.” Then, before I have a chance torespond, she leans toward me, eyes darkening. “Let me ask you something, Doctor—”
    â€œOh, please call me Maggie. I’m not—”
    Anya interrupts before I can remind her that I’m a bereavement counselor, not a doctor.
    â€œMaggie.” She says my name the way I imagine she would say the words “day spa” or “decaf.” “Do you have a dog?”
    I only hesitate for a moment, but in that moment I see her eyes flick back and forth between mine, a spark of interest