Devoted to Drew. Loree Lough

enough that she couldn’t remember.

      Once inside her home, she looked around at the rooms she’d redecorated in the hope of filling the gap left by his death. She hadn’t been able to control his feelings toward Drew, nor could she control the disease that had taken him from her, but this...this she could control.

      The first thing she noticed, walking into the now-sunny kitchen, was Drew’s colorful reminder taped to the refrigerator door: A DOG FOR DREW. He’d drawn accurate renditions of not one but seven dogs, one for every year he’d lived, “...so we’re not stuck lookin’ at just one kind.”

      Smiling, she pressed a palm to a curled corner of the yellow construction paper. Oh, how she loved the boy who was slowly emerging from the lonely shell of autism. If adding a furry, four-legged member to the family would help open the crack of what remained of that shell, she’d beg, borrow or grovel...even to the likes of Logan Murray.

      The weather had been glorious these past few days, so she opened the back door and took a deep breath of the sweet spring breeze, then grabbed a notepad and pen from the basket beside the phone and sat at the table. TALKING POINTS, she printed across the top of the pad’s first page, and wrote one through ten in the left margin. Her younger sister, Lily, a freelance writer for several local newspapers, had shared the method when Bianca complained about how difficult it was to dig for interview facts that went deeper than the limited information provided by guests’ press kits. With a bit of luck, the questions she’d written down for Logan would be answered by the man himself.

      She scrolled to his number in her cell phone, took a deep breath and hit the call button. His line rang five times before the now-familiar voice said, “You’ve reached Logan Murray. Leave a message and I’ll get back to you soon.”