" I scooped out the chilly, sleepy ball of puppy and held him to my chest, where he rooted toward the warmth beneath my arm.
"Thank you, Samuel," I whispered, which I know now was an utterly insufficient response. But Samuel seemed content. He bowed his head in a chivalrous, Old-World-ish gesture like a knight accepting his lady's favor, mounted his drooling pony, and disappeared across the misted grounds.
Now, let us clear the air: I am not a stupid girl. I realized the words I'd written in the ledger book were more than ink and cotton. They'd reached out into the world and twisted the shape it in some invisible and unknowable way that brought Samuel to stand beneath my window. But there was a more rational explanation available to me- that Samuel had seen the longing in my face and decided to hell with that bitter old German woman- and I chose to believe that instead.
But still: when I got to my room and settled the brown ball of fur in a nest of pillows, the first thing I did was trawl through my desk drawer for a pen. I found my copy of The Jungle Book, flipped to the blank pages at the back, and wrote: She and her dog were inseparable from that day forward. "

― Alix E. Harrow , The Ten Thousand Doors of January