The author inherits a friend’s Great Dane after his suicide and together they grieve and heal and age and learn about what canines and humans have to offer one another. She makes room for Apollo in her tiny New York apartment, figures out a way to avoid being evicted, and along the way their uneasy introduction to one another becomes an inseparable friendship at a time when she very much needs that. “Am I talking to you, or to myself?” she asks of her adopted companion. “I confess the line has gotten blurred” (205).