Amy had eaten little of the food on her dinner tray when Sister Jacinta-who, because of her sweet high-pitched voice, was secretly called Sister Mouse by the children of Mater Misericordiæ-arrived in the refectory to bring her back to the deck outside the laundry.

The dog had not stopped whimpering since Amy had left. Because of their years of experience with the techniques of manipulation employed by cunning orphans, the nuns were not easy marks. But the dog’s mewling was of such a pathetic character that they could not harden their hearts to it.

Instantly upon Amy’s arrival, the dog quieted and smiled and wagged its tail.

Through the twilight and into the evening, a gaggle of sisters worked on the dog, cutting the terrible mats out of its coat, giving it two baths with shampoo and then a third bath with a flea-killing solution for which Father Leo had made an emergency trip into town.

When Amy strayed more than two steps from the dog, it whimpered, so eventually she participated in the grooming.

Because she was by then hopelessly smitten and desperate to find ways to tie the dog inextricably to Mater Misericordiæ, she decided that they must name it right there, right then, while it was still wet from the bath. Instinctively she knew that a dog with a name would work its way into the sisters’ hearts more quickly than would a nameless stray.

She announced that since Christmas was only a little more than two months away, the dog must be an early gift from Saint Nicholas, and therefore should be named for him. Sister Angelica informed her that this foundling was a girl, which set Amy off her stride only a moment before she said, “Then we’ll call her Nickie.”

Now, almost twenty-eight years later, behind the wheel of the Expedition, Brian glanced away from the road and said, “My God. The same name.”

Amy watched him think through the ramifications of this seeming coincidence, and though he returned his attention to the highway, she knew when a shiver of wonder went through him.

“There was a moment in the Brockmans’ kitchen last night,” Brian remembered, “right before you offered to buy Carl off. You’d been crouching beside the dog, and suddenly you stood up, staring at him so intently. You looked…I don’t know, not just startled, stricken, but I didn’t understand what it was.”

“He said her name. Janet hadn’t mentioned it on the phone to me. Right away, before any of the rest of this strangeness had happened, I knew the name wasn’t a coincidence. And don’t ask me how I knew or what I mean even now about what our Nickie is or why she’s here. But I knew…no coincidence. Then later, when I asked Janet why they decided to call the dog Nickie, she said Theresa named her.”

“The little girl, the autistic girl,” Brian said.

“Yes. Autistic or whatever she may be. Theresa said the dog should be called Nickie because that’s what her name had always been.”

He glanced at her again. “Always?”

“Always. What she meant by that…who knows. But, Brian, she meant something.”

Twenty-eight years earlier and three thousand miles east of the California coast, on that long-ago bath night, the sisters accepted the name Nickie for the foundling. They had seen that already the dog had brought Amy out of her troubling silence, that she no longer seemed to want to keep herself at a distance, that she had begun to smile again. They wanted to encourage her.

Once Nickie was clean and dry, the nuns decided that she could sleep in the infirmary, where Sister Regina Marie served as the night nurse when patients were in residence.

Although bathed, medicated, fed, and provided with a soft bed of folded blankets, the dog who was an early gift from Saint Nicholas proved not to be content without Amy at its side. The ceaseless and pathetic whimpering began again.

In those days, the concept of a therapy dog might not have been widely in use; but the nuns of Mater Misericordiæ recognized that a bond of some value had formed between the girl and the four-footed waif. Rules were bent if not broken, and although in the best of health, Amy bunked in the infirmary during the week that attempts were made to determine from where the dog had come.

The unrelenting and insistent prayers with which Amy pestered God must have made Him throw up His hands in exasperation and shout “All right already!” in the halls of Heaven, because the sisters failed in their good-faith efforts to locate an owner.

After Dr. Shepherd, a veterinarian, had examined Nickie and had brought her shots up to date, and after it had become clear that the dog was uncommonly well-behaved and housebroken, Mater Misericordiæ yet again lived up to its name-Mother of Mercy-and gave Nickie a forever home.

Although, as official mascot, the dog had free rein of all buildings except the church-and was often invited there, as well-she slept every night in Amy’s dorm room. For the next eleven years she was Amy’s shadow, Amy’s confidant, and Amy’s deepest love.

Over those years, of the more than three hundred girls who came at different points in their lives to Mother of Mercy, none became better known than once-shy and silent Amy Harkinson or had more friends, or held more student offices. In each yearbook for more than a decade, no one among them saw her photograph appear more frequently than Amy’s-except Nickie, of course, whose grinning mug brightened more pages than not, appearing in class plays and in a Santa hat at Christmas parties, wearing bunny ears for Easter and an American-flag neckerchief on the Fourth of July, always surrounded by adoring girls and beaming nuns.

Amy was sixteen when one day the usual energetic Nickie seemed tired, the next day still tired, and on the third day lethargic. She was diagnosed with hemangiosarcoma, a fast-spreading cancer that was too advanced for a surgeon to strip it all out or for chemotherapy to hold it at bay.

Nickie’s decline was swift. Her suffering would be certain if she was not given the mercy that is right for innocent animals; and no one could bear to see her suffer.

Because God is never cruel, there is a reason for all things. We must know the pain of loss; because if we never knew it, we would have no compassion for others, and we would become monsters of self-regard, creatures of unalloyed self-interest. The terrible pain of loss teaches humility to our prideful kind, has the power to soften uncaring hearts, to make a better person of a good one.

Mother of Mercy was a fine school as well as an orphanage. The passing of Nickie, dear mascot to all and sister to Amy, provided an opportunity not only to share but also to learn.

Those girls who felt strong enough-most did-were invited to assemble at twilight in the quadrangle, where the issue of animals’ souls was not debated but quietly accepted, and where prayers were said for Nickie. And during prayers, as twilight faded, candles were raised, hundreds of candles, while at the center of those assembled, Amy knelt beside her best friend to give comfort and to bear witness.

Sister Agnes Mary, the infirmarian, had volunteered to assist Dr. Shepherd, the veterinarian, in the administration of the two injections. The first would be a sedative to convey Nickie into a deep sleep, and the second would be the drug that stopped her heart.

Nickie’s favorite recreation-room sofa had earlier been placed in the center of the quadrangle, and Nickie, so weakened, had been carried to it. Amy knelt on the ground, face to face with this first dog that she had ever saved.

Estimated to have been three when she had limped up the meadow to her mistress, Nickie had been fourteen there in the last twilight of her fabled life, but she had still looked like a puppy, with little white in her face.

Only sixteen, Amy found a strength in herself that she had not known she possessed, strength to keep her voice calm and reassuring, even if she could not hold back the tears.