She tilted her head—a gesture so purely canine that it made my chest ache. Then she sat down cross-legged in front of my bench, tail sweeping dry leaves across the pavement. “What are you drawing?”

“It’s an artistic choice.”

And yes, before you ask—she was a dog girl. Ears that twitched with every emotion, a tail that wagged in short, sharp bursts when she was happy, and eyes that held the kind of honest warmth most humans spend years in therapy trying to access.