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Sophie has always known how to play on her appeal. “She’s one of those dogs that puffs her chest up a little bit.”
    Underneath this is a brotherly gripe that Sophie—like Bridget—has ended up getting a softer version of parental treatment. Bridget is the youngest by far, and by her time, the family business was humming along and Dave was home more often, even in the afternoons, when Bridget came home from school. Luke would say—with sly affection—that Sophie and Bridget are both as bad each other: bright, precious, and able to manipulate their way into any situation and anyone’s heart. “Sophie is a bit like Bridget; she knows how to cast her spell,” Luke says. “I think she plays the game; she knows how everyone is and how to respond to them. She’s intuitive.”
    On the flip side, Bridget admits that she didn’t like Jordy very much. But when she describes Sophie, it’s with the parental coo of a mother proud of her awe-inspiring offspring.
    Despite Bridget’s adoration of Sophie, the romance was destined to have its limits. Sophie arrived in Bridget’s life just as Bridget was gearing up for a new phase: her final high school year before university. She was just sixteen when she pleaded with Jan for a dog, and she was desperate for it to happen, partly because it really was her last chance. Bridget would be headingoff to college in just over a year. And in the meantime, she had a lot of things to do, some of which were going to take her away from home.
    Just a few short months after Sophie became a Griffith, Bridget left for Germany on a one-month cultural exchange. She was torn, though: “I nearly decided to stay because a month is a long time to miss out on when they’re puppies,” she recalls, sounding like a new mother deciding between being a stay-at-home mom and going back to her career.
    But go she did, and sure enough, within a month, a lot happened. Bridget got food poisoning and spent days heaving on her host family’s bathroom floor, struggling with sickness and her own non-existent Deutsch. Meanwhile, Sophie continued to fill out. She no longer wobbled when she walked, her fur darkened and her head widened, seemingly in a matter of days. While Bridget was experiencing a whole life (and not an easy one, at that) abroad, Sophie was becoming a gleaming animal worthy of a Purina commercial.
    Crucially, she also became Dave’s dog. Cattle dogs, like teenage girls, need to have a best friend. Without Bridget around to drive through town with or flop under a chair by the pool next to, Sophie needed someone else to follow around the house, and Dave, who wasn’t happy without a pool filter to fix or a mission to the shops to fulfill, was the ideal candidate.
    Bridget knew things had changed the moment she got home. “I came back hoping that I’d still be herfavorite and I totally wasn’t. While I’d been in Germany, she’d become Dad’s dog,” says Bridget. She saw she’d become second choice whenever Sophie had an option to stick with Dave. Dave could be sitting under the house with a newspaper and Bridget ready to go for a run and Sophie would stand looking back and forth between them, torn. “She still loved me but I could tell I had lost her.”
    Sophie bonded intently with the man of the house. As inevitably seemed to happen with all the family dogs, Dave slowly emerged as Sophie’s prime caregiver. Sophie seemed to decide that he was the answer to Bridget’s absence. It wasn’t a calculated thing, it was more that Dave just had an effect on dogs. He would talk to them and they would love to hang out with him as he got busy in the garden or puttered around the pool. Jan’s explanation is simple: “I don’t do things that dogs love to do; Dave does.” Dave is a busy guy, a doer who doesn’t like to sit still for very long, and he understands that