Paige Foster, Chapter 2: “Carry Him Everywhere You Go”

Seven Years & a Marathon First Date

Paige & Atticus on Mount Pierce looking toward Mount Washington

I do my best not to romanticize or deify the dogs I’ve known. But from the beginning, there was something storied about Atticus. Paige saw it before she packed him up and shipped him off to me more than a thousand miles away. It’s the main reason she was going to keep him.

But fate, and her good heart, interfered when a man from Newburyport, Massachusetts, contacted her. She’d later say, “It shattered me to say goodbye to him, but something bigger than me told me you needed him more.”

It would take seven years to discover this, but the day Paige said goodbye to 8-week-old Atticus at the airport, she stayed in the parking lot and wept for over an hour.

In the first months with Atticus, I called Paige often—usually in a panic because I wanted to get it right. I owed it to him, and I owed it to Max, who went most of his life without most of the important things.

Always—always Paige would end the phone call with her thick as syrup…